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Your support network
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28/11/2006
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Productivity is everything nowadays. How that productivity is defined varies – current favourites include time to market, time to volume or even time to money – but the bottom line is that designers are under pressure to get the job done as quickly as possible.
These pressures have existed for some time in the consumer electronics world, where shelf lives dictate a rapid development cycle for products. But those pressures are now becoming common in the embedded systems sector. So it’s no surprise to see companies developing ways to help embedded systems designers maintain their productivity.
A key activity within the embedded systems world is developing board support packages (BSP). These packages have a seemingly simple role in life: to help the designer’s embedded software application to communicate with the hardware resources available on the host processor.
Paul Tingey is a systems architect with Wind River. He gave his view of what a BSP is. “The best way to describe a BSP,” he believed, “is as an abstraction layer between the operating system and hardware. When you want to run a generic operating system on a specific piece of hardware, you need a layer between the two and that’s a BSP.”
So what’s in a BSP. Tingey noted: “A BSP will include analysis and configuration tools and may also include device drivers over and above those which come with the operating system. What a BSP does is to take you away from the operating system and the hardware. And you need a BSP whenever you’re going to run a real time operating system or something like it – Linux, for example.”
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Author
Graham Pitcher
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