May 2016
40
D
evelopment
T
ools
Everyone involved in the electronics design
industry is familiar with these approaches,
and we’re all guilty of relying on them every
single day. Every week, countless hours are
spent patching the holes in design workflows,
fixing mistakes, working overtime and maybe
even weekends because of them. Yet the engi-
neering industry as a whole has done little
to respond. Next year there might be a bet-
ter interchange file format, but that’s entirely
missing the point. We’re all part of this prob-
lem, and we are becoming all too familiar with
the real costs of our failed design collabora-
tion processes. First: missed time to market
and budgets, with design revisions slipping
through the cracks and prototype costs sky-
rocketing from failed communication pro-
cesses. Second: wasted time and productivity
with designers having to manage multiple
revisions that could have been solved the first
time with a properly implemented collab-
oration system. Third: product experiences
that are compromised during the design
phase based on budget and time constraints
vs. being iterated to perfection. The pain is
clear, the wasted time is ever-present, and the
one thing we all want to know is: what are we
going to do about it?
I’ll say it again: We don’t need another inter-
change file format. If you’ve been raised on
old-school engineering tools like most of us
have, then you’ve been forced to accept inter-
change file formats as a part of life. But this
method of design is flawed, and it completely
ignores the real needs of true design collabo-
ration. What is needed are intelligent design
tools that allow for communication between
one another. Intelligent tools that don’t require
engineers to shove data into a box and pass it
along. With these tools, there are no boxes –
there is no data translation. In this collabora-
tive engineering process, data is being shared
and transmitted instantly between design
platforms, across a diverse range of engineer-
ing domains. To achieve this, our design tools
have to change first, in big ways. Here’s what’s
needed: Bi-directional data synchronization.
These tools need to share data seamlessly,
without requiring any kind of interchange
file formats. What does this mean in a prac-
tical scenario? Being able to commit changes
between design environments, and have
those changes instantly transmitted to our fel-
low engineers. It can be as simple as this if
I move a component on a board it’s going to
possibly affect the mechanical enclosure that
my MCAD engineer designed. The only way
to efficiently keep the MCAD engineer in the
loop about this change is to push the change
to his design environment. Allow him to see
the revision in his own workflow, so he can
adjust his design accordingly.
Not only does data need to be shared, we
need to be able to add the human element of
communication into the mix outside of the
unmanaged channels that we rely on. Within
our design platforms, we need a connected
and universal communication environment
that allows us to clearly articulate the design
revisions that have been made and share those
details with others involved in the design pro-
cess. What does this look like in a practical
application? Like the example, an engineer
makes a change to the component placement
on a PCB, and not only is this change pushed
to the mechanical designer environment, but
the electronics engineer is also able to include
a detailed note of exactly what was changed,
and most importantly, why it was changed.
This is the way forward for effectively commu-
nicating design intent.
As our tools evolve to provide us with the data
synchronization and commenting abilities
that are needed, it’s also necessary to work on
the design workflows. As engineers, we need
to develop a holistic understanding of the
entire design process, and understand how
our specialized applications will affect the
entire product workflow. Simply put, we need
to begin working in parallel on our designs.
Not only will this enhance our ability to com-
municate, but it will make our design process
that much more efficient.
We need to start developing these solutions
now. It won’t happen overnight, and it’s going
to be a slow transition. But the reality is that
technology is just going to become more
complex. Products are going to keep getting
smaller, thinner, and faster than we could have
ever imagined. Do we really want to be relying
on interchange file formats 10 years from now?
Trying to communicate layers upon layers of
complexity in a chain of emails and translated
file formats? We don’t. We need something
more intelligent, and we need our design tools
to finally catch up to this information-rich era
of technology in which we all live.
n
Rohde & Schwarz: verify compliance
of embedded multimedia card
interfaces with RTO oscilloscopes
Rohde & Schwarz expands the functional
range of its R&S RTO oscilloscope with the
new R&S RTO-K92 eMMC compliance test
software. The software option offers auto-
mated embedded multimedia cards (eMMC)
interface compliance tests in line with the cur-
rent JEDEC standard version 5.1. It not only
covers the HS200 speed class, it is the first to
offer compliance testing for HS400.
Segger brings J-Link to Atmel
Xplained evaluation kits
SEGGER’s J-Link is now available on Atmel’s
low cost Xplained evaluation platforms, as an
on-board debug probe. SEGGER is excited
to bring the proven reliability and outstand-
ing performance of the J-Link line of debug
probes to the Atmel Xplained evaluation plat-
form. The Atmel Xplained evaluation kits pro-
vide an on-board, single chip debug solution
called Atmel EDBG for which SEGGER now
has released an upgraded firmware to give
the users the capability to convert their Atmel
EDBG to a J-Link OB. The firmware has been
developed in close cooperation with Atmel
and can be downloaded from the SEGGER
website, free of charge.
eCosCentric introduces eCosPro 4.0 RTOS
eCosCentric announced a major release of
the eCosPro real-time operating system. The
new 4.0 release of the eCosPro Developer’s Kit
delivers improvements to the development
tools, marks a change to 64-bit native host
tools, includes the latest Mars version of the
Eclipse IDE, consolidates run-time enhance-
ments and delivers full-featured evaluation
copies of key eCosCentric middleware.
DDC-I: small footprint version of Deos
safety-critical embedded RTOS
DDC-I announces the availability of a reduced
footprint implementation of its safety-critical,
DO-178C-certifiable Deos real-time oper-
ating system. The new small footprint RTOS
targets NXP’s ultra-reliable MPC 56XX and
57XX family of microcontrollers, which are
optimized for safety-critical applications such
as powertrains, engine management, motor
control, body
Lynx: secure bare-metal networking and
advanced cloud-based threat detection
Lynx Software Technologies unveiled the
LynxSecure 5.3 Separation Kernel Hypervisor
at Embedded World, and announced a pow-
erful new capability that extends the principle
of domain separation to the network connec-
tion. At the same time, in partnership with
Webroot, they revealed real time cloud-based
threat detection for guest operating systems
hosted by LynxSecure.
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