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The user experience in wireless and consumer applications is today already mainly determined by applications running in higher-level, hardware-independent development platforms like Java™ and specific SDKs. Figure 165 shows the trend from proprietary operating systems towards open operating systems, which encourage application developments mostly from third-party developers. Since the introduction of online application stores, some consumer hardware has become the delivery vehicle for distribution of applications, which are controlled by the operating system that enables them. Application developers are offered a distribution vehicle and in exchange they pay a percentage back to the environment’s proprietor. The result is that, in a unique way, the OS providers have found a vehicle to monetize the end applications rather than hardware platforms.
In the past, the operating systems themselves used to be quite profitable licensing businesses then in 2008 there were some sudden changes with handset operating systems being acquired by major vendor, while conversely we saw the release of the Android operating system. Several handset providers also released their own proprietary operating system platforms. At the time of writing in 2010, Microsoft®
Windows Mobile™ has become the only widely-used operating system that still charges license fees to mobile handset manufacturers.
Instead of making the OS a “licensable product,” the new model is that the handsets and the embedded OSs running on them have now become a channel to provide applications of astonishing depth and variety. We estimate that users have a choice of more than 500,000 different applications across the various operating systems and platforms, accessible though various online application stores. For mobile applications this defines a fundamental shift in where the business value lies and it is unlikely to be reversed.What does all this mean for chip design and prototyping? The effect on development is that because the value is moving into applications, software will increase even further in importance and its development needs will take precedence. In effect, the software will increasingly govern how the hardware is designed. In the case of mobile wireless and consumer applications this means that hardware developers need to provide fairly generic execution engines as early as possible and independent from the actual hardware. For our 12 prototyping selection criteria, this means that replication cost and time of availability will be of highest importance. The sheer number of application developers will require a very inexpensive way to develop applications, which will push more capabilities into SDKs. Time of availability will be important and in a sense hardware and software development will increasingly be done upside down – with the software being available before the hardware and the hardware designed to execute OS-based software in the most efficent way.
While the trend to isolate software development from hardware effects using hardware abstraction layers and OSs will strengthen even further, user expectations for high quality applications will grow and as such application verification will also gain importance.
Future SDKs will have to provide some of the application verification capabilities which already exist today for other software development environments like virtual platforms and host development environments. For example, software memory checking is a well-known technique in the host workstation space and quality verification tools such as Valgrind, Purify, BoundsChecker, Insure++, or GlowCode are part of any industry-strength software design flow. However, these types of tools are not generally available or widely used in the embedded world. SDKs and virtual platforms are the appropriate prototyping areas to which these capabilities should be added.
There will still be a need for FPGA-based prototyping for the lowest levels of the software stack where speed and accuracy are needed at the same time. In addition, the needs of the hardware platform do not become any more relaxed. For example, the leading platforms will be low power and high capacity while providing highest quality multimedia, versatile interfaces and all in a reliable, low-cost and small 394 Chapter 14: The future of prototyping format package. This means very advanced SoC designs and many overlapping projects in order to introduce new models at the rate that market leadership demands. Relentless and accelerated SoC project development demands reuse of FPGA-based prototyping methodology. We simply will not have time to re-invent wheels and methods or create large-scale prototyping hardware for every design. An in-house standard platform strategy and Design-for-Prototyping methodology will be required to keep all those software-dominated projects on schedule.
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