MDD and lDEs: making the twain meet in embedded systems design

摘要

Embedded system developers are stuck between the rock and the hard place, faced as they are with increasingly complex systems, more lines of code, more powerful processors, and the need to generate code that accurately reflects the real-time and deterministic requirements of applications such as automotive and industrial control. On the one hand, developers need to use high-level Model Driven Development (MDD) tools, such as UML, to accurately capture the behavior and characteristics of the design environment inside, say, an automobile, in which multiple processors may be linked together to enable all elements in that environment to communicate and, when necessary, work together. On the other hand, developers must also work at the code level, usually within an integrated development environment (IDE) to generate, debug, analyze, and test the code for each element in the system.