With complete design and manufacturing capabilities, the third-party offers a cost effective, timely, proven solution to customers with complete flexibility. Customers can concentrate on their design development strengths while the third-party takes their concept to full production, dramatically simplifying the value chain.
Electronic manufacturing services (EMS]:
In the EMS model, the third-party can take an external design and prototype the product. This helps to identify problem areas and fix issues with re-engineering, assembly changes, supplier changes, and more. In addition, the third- party is responsible for conducting tests for manufacturability, assembly, cost, supply chain, and performance.
Design services:
Customers can augment their design team by utilising resources from the third- party as a stand-alone design service. The third-party offers contract engineering design services to assist OEM customers and partners with product development.
Contract design manufacturer (CDM):
Using this model, the third-party works with the OEM customer to both design and manufacture the product.
Future developments
Considering the behavioral aspect of embedded systems, a clear trend can be seen towards increased intelligence and connectivity of the devices.
Intelligence:
Today, though systems are known to demonstrate reactive behaviour, these are likely to depict active and even pro-active behaviour in the future. Speech and sound recognition too could be considered as modes of communication with the embedded systems. But a lot of processing will be involved to bring out such a change. A strong trend in the video domain is the shift from 2D to 3D images.
Connectivity and mobility:
With increasing wireless standards, the next-generation wireless networks will face two consequences: high-speed data will become a more dominant traffic type and the demand for voice channels will continue to increase.
The transition from predominantly voice traffic to a mix of voice and high-speed data, coupled with the need for increased capacity, will result in a substantial increase in the amount of signaling among nodes in the network. Coincident with this transition is an economic trend towards lower cost per channel that is driving new standards development. Equipment manufacturers require a new industry standard interconnect technology that offers high bandwidth, low processing and protocol overhead, and low implementation cost to enable new time-to-market advantages.
Hardware and software reusability:
Re-use of software and hardware components and explicit modeling of generic interfaces will be advocated as much as possible. To be able to design these heterogeneous systems at board and IC level and stay within the time-to-market requirements that become more and more constrained, the amount of re-use of existing hardware, software and components has to increase drastically from a current 20 per cent to at least 80 per cent. This aspect is coupled with the general need to increase design productivity significantly to be able to cope with the increasing complexity. Designers are now aiming at 32- and 64-bit embedded processors for performance levels that are beyond the range of the 8-bit and 16-bit micro controllers.
Conclusion
Comprehensive, seamless, and connected embedded systems may still be a dream today, but are quickly becoming more accessible and controllable, thanks to LAN, WAN, and the Internet. Many businesses are already using embedded technology to innovate with voice, video, and data traffic, hoping to set the stage for a competitive advantage in the future.
With so much attention being paid to making the Internet pervasive, smart, and easy to use, the sky is the limit for embedded systems. Beyond the sheer numbers and dwindling price, embedded systems are becoming smarter and more controllable, thus benefiting both businesses and consumers alike.
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| Posted : 8/29/2005 |
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