Around the Block, But Not Over the Hill
by Lindsey Vereen
Since the transistor is 50 years old, the IC 40, and the microprocessor
nearing 30, I think we can safely say that the electronics industry has
been around the block a few times. It has its icons, such as William
Schockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, who developed the transistor;
Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby, who combined to invent the IC; and Frederico
Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor, who
conspired to design the first
microprocessor.
Most technologies as old as electronics have more of a
past than a future. I don’t think that’s true of electronics,
though. Despite its age, the electronics industry has yet to mature, and
the embedded segment is still positively child-like.
A couple of decades
ago, a TI processor handbook contained the prediction that the ratio
between hardware and software complexity in systems would shift from 80%
hardware and 20% software to 80% software and 20%
hardware. Typical desktop
applications at that time—WordStar, for example—fit comfortably
on a single 360K floppy disk. By the launch of
Embedded Systems
Programming
in 1988, the world was moving to 1.2MB floppies and most
computers had modestly sized hard disks to accommodate WordPerfect, a word
processor that boasted many more features than WordStar and consumed far
more than 360K of memory.
You can see the same growth patterns in
embedded system development. Even as the hardware mushrooms
in complexity
(and new embedded processor architectures are springing forth more rapidly
than ever) the value continues to shift towards software. As a sign of the
legitimacy of the embedded systems discipline,
Wired
recently
profiled Wind River’s Jerry Fiddler in an article (“Lord of the
Toasters,” September 1998, p. 130) that offered a historical
perspective of embedded systems and presented some eye-opening numbers on
the current and projected size of the software side of the
market.
Embedded Systems Programming
is 10 years old this month, not really
old at all compared to the age of the electronics industry. However, during
this past decade the embedded systems industry has come into its own,
thanks to better tools, cheaper, more powerful processors, and a lot of
creative developers. The magazine has been fortunate to be around to
witness this growth. The fact that
Embedded Systems Programming
still exists indicates that the development problems are not all solved.
In
fact, a glance at the original editorial calendar for the magazine shows
that many of the challenges are still the same—scheduling, debugging,
integration, programming methodologies, algorithms, and real-time
applications, to name just a few. New problems are arising as well. In
addition to burgeoning software content in embedded systems, gigabit
memories, gigahertz processors and 0.1-micron design rules are less than
two years off. While these advances may not be deployed in embedded systems
immediately, you’ll find them there soon enough. They promise to keep
the future of embedded systems development exciting.
Lindsey Vereen
lvereen@cmp.com
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