Michel Genard

It is all about the interfaces!

I was at the Freescale conference this week (FTF2010 in Orlando, FL) and the Wednesday’ key note speech from Hugh Herr was truly inspiring in a lot of dimensions. First, at human being level, Hugh after suffering severe amputations of his legs (a climbing accident), instead of resigning to his condition to be forever disabled, he decided to study the field of biomechatronics, becomes an associate professor at MIT  and designed prosthesis to turn his handicap as an advantage and he is climbing again!  Secondly from an education perspective, he is clearly a very good teacher and knows well how to convey complex problems and challenges in easy to understand concept. For example, he mentioned that when he is asked about what business his company is about (he created a startup to commercialize his research), he said he was in the transportation business, thinking at this level of abstraction is brilliant indeed it is about providing to human a tools to go from point a to point b. Lastly when Hugh talked about all the challenges to overcome during his many years of research, he said it was about how you connect  the body to a piece of metal with some electronic in a seamless way. As he was talking about this point, I thought that in the embedded software field as well, the hardware/software interfaces were the most difficult part to debug. Indeed when interfaces consist to connect different type of systems; in Hugh's example live tissues with electronics, in automotive moving mechanical parts with electronic units and in embedded software hardware (in the form of devices) to firmware or drivers, you are inevitably challenge to understand how you can manipulate and interact with two different domains and make sense of data available to you (are you debugging the hardware or the software, which piece influence what, etc..?). For Wind River Simics users, this is precisely a classic use cases our customers found great value. By modeling the system at a functional level the engineers have at their fingerprint a single file that describe the hardware configuration (at the software API level) on which they can run arbitrary software from low level firmware to full stack. Because the model run in a simulated environment (where the virtual system is isolated from the executed host environment), the user has full control over time and can checkpoint, inspect, trace anything and even execute the software in reserve to go back in time…a true time machine!  Thank you Mr. Herr for your great presentation.

A Few Ashes in the Sky Made Me Virtual

I wished I was a virtual system. We take for granted that access to the infrastructure is always on and available for telecommunications, broadband, and travel. Well, some ashes from the remote volcano brought human beings back to earth.

I am in France right now, part of a two-week EMEA tour to visit our field and customers, and I am grounded; I can’t travel to Sweden and I still don’t know when I will make it back to the U.S. The icing on the cake is that the France union decided on another French specialty (not culinary): a train strike. So I’m going to use virtual infrastructure (i.e., WebEx) to take care of my meeting this week; not so bad after all. I could have been stuck in a worse place than Paris.

All of this has made me think about how lucky our Wind River Simics customers are, who can virtualize their electronic systems. If I could pretend to be a Simics virtual platform, my boss could email me to field or customer sites with the click of a mouse. I could be debugged, check-pointed, run forward and backward (yes, my native French accent sometimes makes that a nice feature to have). All of these things that our customers are doing, from networking rack, avionics equipment, or complex industry PLC, can be combined into a single software file, virtual hardware, and full software stack.

In my previous blog I made the point to go virtual to go real. Voila! Thanks to volcano Eyjafjallajokull, I can.

Get Real, Go Virtual

I am going to make a bold statement: Go virtual to create reality. Seems crazy enough?

According to Wikipedia, reality means "the state of things as they actually exist.” The concept of existence can be elusive, because to exist, something doesn’t need to be real; it just needs to have its own relevance. Often we humans use simplified terms to explain complex concepts or situations and we describe phenomena in mathematical equations. We do it all the time in many domains such as philosophy, physics, nuclear, and chemistry, and it works.

A developer of an embedded device will naturally carry on the development using real equipment, from host to hardware. Being close to the real thing can create a safe and secure feeling. The board is not working properly, the cable has a loose connection, I spend hours setting up a switch correctly, but it makes me feel like I am working on something real, and when it works (a miracle!) it is time to go back home and hope for tomorrow. On top of that, I am sure we all agree that there is no need to write more about the complexity of developing embedded devices.

What is more intriguing is to consider what the industry, from suppliers to OEMs, has done to crack down on the problem. From my perspective, if a lot has been done to provide better separate hardware and software solutions, there is still a divide–and-conquer attitude where hardware and software are developed in silo, with loose integration between the two entities that creates a big-bang back-end mega-challenge integration (and always too late). Eventually from the OEM side, it still ends up being ad hoc, with a lot of tactical thinking to solve issues as they arrive. My favorite one being to offshore part of the development in cheaper countries and hope that by bringing more people to the bench the problems will go away. Guess what? It doesn’t work. Best case is a stop-gap.

What would you think if you could define, develop, and deploy your electronic system using virtualized system development, where you can have a virtual representation of the target at a high-level of abstraction, enabling system architecture exploration, firmware and OS development, debug, test, and monitor, all integrated into an extremely fast, functional simulator that lets you run unmodified and arbitrary software? This is what thousands of users of Simics have experienced since 2004 with great success at companies like Cisco, Ericsson, Freescale Semiconductor, GE Avionics, Huawei, Honeywell, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Nortel, and Northrop Grumman.

Simics is now a Wind River embedded software product, after the closing of the acquisition of Virtutech by Intel, announced February 5, 2010. And Wind River is going to offer Simics to a broader audience, enabling a much larger market.

Welcome to a virtual world, and create reality.