Automated Sensor Firmware Development - Generation, Optimization, and Analysis

Embedded systems design has lately become particularly challenging due to fast increasing system complexities, realtime demands and reliability requirements. At the same time, designs are constrained by stringent power budgets, limited memory capacity and short time-to-markets. Recently, various methods to automatically generate, analyze, and optimize different stages of the design flow have been investigated. The evaluation of these methods, however, often focuses on a single associated field of research and thus may not consider the domain-crossing effects that stem from the interaction of different design methods. This paper presents a complete and fully automated workflow that covers model-based generation, analysis, and optimization aspects for embedded firmware and demonstrates it on a virtual system prototype of a typical inertial sensor node. We illustrate the integration of different design and evaluation methods on a realistic example and show potential opportunities for the application of gathered information in order to improve the design.