Summary of best practices for high-performance embedded system development

This section contains a series of recommendations intended to help developers of high-performance embedded systems achieve success. While by no means exhaustive, this list should provide a good starting point for your next development effort.

Designing for test

One of the most constructive things you can do during the design process for a complex embedded system is to, at all stages, include features that enable easy testing of the system. By doing this, system designers enable the efficient evaluation of system performance and the rapid completion of system testing.

Designing for test may involve the addition of test points on printed circuits or the use of processor or FPGA chips that support enhanced debugging features. Regardless of the specific technologies involved in the design-for-test process, the goal must be to make the internal behavior of the system as visible as possible during testing...