Simulation Development Platform For Embedded Systems Architecture

The development of embedded-system application is becoming more and more popular in computer industry. The soul of all electronic products, such as information appliance, is the embedded system. Among many development tools, simulation development platform has its advantages in rapid, efficient and low-cost development and helps to improve efficiency and quality of embedded system development. But how to construct a development platform that can support various hardware platforms, meet application development for different kinds of information products and integrate with exist tools and software is a very difficult problem at all times. This dissertation is devoted to this subject with deep research and practice focusing on software architecture.As the main structure and blueprint are the keys to the success of an architectural design, the software architecture is the foundation and key to the success of software design. Software architecture's principles and functions are studied as well as related technologies.Software bus is an advanced software architecture design style now. Just as Industry production has been out of burden which led to bus-structure's rise because of the complication of hardware system, software development also has stepped to the "bus age" .The theory of software bus is studied and analyzed in details, as well that how the distributed object technique support or realize it is discussed.Based on the deep study of software architecture and software bus, we research and design a new kind of software bus named iBUS in which we introduces a new design method that break through the limitation of traditional component model, provides a feasible approach for reusing commercial components and moving them in different environment, and give a new solution for software plug and play. We elaborate the design principle of iBUS, give the architectural and functional model of it, and formalize it using Z specification language in the dissertation. Subsequently, we validate the structure of iBUS elementarily, give a brief analysis and discussion of its property, and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of it by contrasting with other bus architecture.The general demand of the simulation development platform for embedded system is analyzed, and an integrated framework for simulation development platform of home appliance controllers based on iBUS is presented to meet the specific functional requirement of home appliance controllers in which software bus technology is introduced to solve the complexity and porting problem in embedded system caused by the hardware complexity and relativity. A prototype of iBUS in the framework is also implemented in the paper.The implementation and running of the simulation platform have shown the feasibility and practicability of iBUS in system design. For further research work of simulation development platform of embedded system, the effort achieved in this paper is valuable.