SOLUTIONS

Consumer Applications

Superior Systems Engineering Tools for Embedded Systems Design

VaST provides manufacturers of consumer electronics such as cameras and printers with the systems engineering tools required to get to market sooner with higher quality products that cost less to build. Using VaST's tools and virtual system prototyping technologies, consumer electronic designers rapidly explore multiple design alternatives without having to build costly and time-consuming physical prototypes.

Many areas of consumer electronics, such as digital cameras, MP4 players, printers and digital radios, contain increasingly large amounts of embedded software interacting with complex hardware. Much of this software operates in an environment of inflexible real-time constraints. All consumer electronics products are developed in an environment of intense cost sensitivity where design challenges cannot afford to be solved by over-engineering the SoC.

Optimal Embedded Systems Design Increases Profit Margins

Using VaST embedded systems design tools and models to create an optimal architecture for a SoC can make a big difference to the profit margin for the chip and the system built around it. For example, a cache memory that is unnecessarily large results in wasted silicon area and thus increased cost, while a cache memory that is too small results in lower performance than optimum for the application. VaST's virtual system prototypes enable architectural exploration that produces quantitative results on aspects such as power consumption, performance and cost.

In most consumer products, aspects of the system performance are visible to the end purchaser as capabilities of the product, such as the rate at which a digital camera can take photos or the ability of an MP4 player to play music continuously under all circumstances. The VaST suite of systems engineering tools and models allows developers to evaluate architectures and then run the hardware and software together to ensure that the product will have the right performance and features to meet market requirements.

A growing number of consumer products are battery powered. The power measurement capabilities of VaST's virtual system prototype solutions means that estimating the actual power usage for features such as the number of photographs per recharge can be minimized before the real chip is available.

Using VaST's virtual system prototype, embedded software development can begin even before the detailed hardware design has been finalized. Porting of operating systems and communication stacks, together with the development of both driver and application code, can be overlapped with the hardware design and development. This concurrent design and development means that product cycle times and time to market for new and iterated products are substantially reduced.

Learn more about embedded systems design in wireless and telecom.

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