11.2 The Software Development Process for Embedded Systems

11.2.1 The Software Production Cycle

The process outlined here has one key purpose: to enable designers to embed their software is fully tested and operational hardware. Figure 11.2 lays out the basic software development production cycle that has evolved with time and experience. The process starts with the typing in the source program itself. Thus, keyboard and display facilities are needed, together with text-handling software. Such a software package is called an editor. The source program or "source code" is assembled or compiled into a linkable file. In a small system, this would be the complete target program. For most systems, though, we develop software using program building blocks. In their simplest form, these are libraries of commonly used functions. The linker software allows us to integrate our program with such libraries. But even more importantly, we don't have to consider the internal details...