The environment of an embedded system will influence it's design in three major ways.
- Compatibility of the physical environment with respect to the embedded system's requirements (temperature, electromagnetic interference, humidity, vibrations, etc).
- Compatibility of the embedded system with the environement's requirements (legislation regarding electromagnetic emission, safety laws, etc).
- The system
must be able to handle the environment's dynamics of sensors and actuators while providing correct system functionality.
The three
aspects require different methodologies and tools to enable rapid, cheap and successful design and implementation of
embedded systems.
Enabling the embedded system functionality to handle a varying environment asks for capabilities to design for not all but
at least most of the environmental aspects that are important for the intended product. This places the focus on, for
example, sensor and actuator modeling, antenna and communication channel modeling. The current state of the art
consists of many diverse and incompatible tools developed in Fortran/C/C++ or using Matlab. Here, as well, the available
tools are not compatible and not inter-operable with other major hardware and software design tools.
