Practical Applications of Data Abstraction Techniques for Embedded Systems Debug
Today's modern embedded platform often consists of one or more control processors cooperating with multiple slave signal or other dedicated processors, a collection of interacting storage mechanisms, a number of peripheral components, and custom hardware blocks, all tied together with high- and low-speed communication paths. Operating on this collection of components is a range of software blocks that include firmware code segments for specific processors, application code to drive the whole system and provide user interfaces, middleware functions that enable specific activities, and a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) to tie the whole thing together while providing intricate platform operational capability.
To debug even a basic embedded processor system, the data being manipulated must be inspected against both the state of the major hardware components and the flow of the software on the various processors. By way of example, let's consider an audio signal processing platform utilizing many of the features noted above (Figure 1). Discovering and understanding operational detail and tracking potential problems across such a diverse and often beguiling range of hardware and software infrastructure requires inventive data abstraction approaches beyond traditional visualization methods.