ESC IBM keynote
May 4, 2011 – San Jose, CA—Meg Selfe, a vice president at IBM rational software presented “smarter by design: smarter products for a smarter planet”. Paying intelligence to the instrumented, informed world leads to innovation. The drivers for changes in embedded systems are new and emerging technologies, market needs, economics, and viability.
CEOs participating in an IBM study are going in the direction of getting closer to their clients. To do this they need new and differentiated products and services as well as more collaborative efforts to harness the values in those products. Software is one focus area where competency is an asset and a differentiator. Three aspects of software are key: Software delivery; the increase in system engineering to achieve time-to-market, quality and reduced cost goals; the move towards systems of systems resulting from the integration of multiple subsystems, all requiring information transfer to function properly.
Disruptive change is what drives all of this. For example music has gone from analog to digital, which has driven innovation in platforms. Cassette tapes gave way to CDs, which got displaced by computer-based music players, and finally to integrated MP3 players. Phones have gone through similar progressions and cell phones now include a camera, music player, PDA, a game platform, and, ultimately, a smart phone can also replace many functions of a full-blown computer.
As functions and capabilities move across platforms, new product development becomes a summation of technology and business drivers. IBM has developed into a set of engineering capabilities that emphasize software as the key for full life-cycle planning. They are working in applications areas including military, aerospace, automotive, energy and utilities, telecommunications, and others. Their projects require them to design, deliver, and manage the entire development process.
For example, one project involves wind turbine control and management were part of the process included data collection and management for the wind turbine system. The issues that blocked innovation included evolving business models, increased product complexity, an extension of the enterprise to other areas, and a disconnect between the operations and support groups.
Large system projects always have issues relating to coordination versus engineering and development. In complex projects, the challenge is in managing interactivity and integration to achieve your desired goals. One aspect of many complex designs is a need for more and open standards to enable product innovation. Standards reduce the silos holding important information and lead to greater flexibility and responsiveness in the design groups and in the final systems.
An example of the system-level approach is a project being worked on with GM on the Volt car. They approached the design of this car as a system that happened to be a plug-in hybrid automobile. The car required a new battery system, electrical drive motors and running gear, and cabin electronics to control and manage and display the operating conditions of the vehicle.
The Volt only took 28 months to design from project kickoff, versus the normal 50 to 60 months standards for automobiles. In addition to normal automotive functions the volt includes network connections to the power grid, mobile apps, and even in embedded IP address for future expansion capabilities. The amount of software going into cars hasn’t been increasing tremendously since the 1980s. In the 80’s cars had about 10,000 lines of code. By the 90’s, this is increased to over 100,000 lines of code and last year cars were shipping with over 1 million lines of code. If this trend continues, by 2020 cars will have more than 10 million lines of code.
The growing volume of software code can be a very large problem. High-end cars will be running 100 million lines of code across hundreds of processors that must all communicate and interact. As a result, a carmaker cannot just bolt on more stuff into the car, write a small amount of code, and expect it to work properly. The software in a car far exceeds the number of lines of code in an F-22 fighter plane which has about 6 million lines of code. Integrating functions into cars is very difficult because new functions increase overall system complexity.
When IBM went into GM to evaluate and streamline their design flows, they increased the CAD tools, added a wide range of software development and debug tools and installed a collaborative process to manage design lifecycles. GM was mostly using non-automated, in-house tools so IBM had to insert connectors within the tool chains and increasing automation to improve the design flows.
A study by the Aberdeen group found that best in class tools and flows result in 19% of users meet or exceed their budget targets, they create 4.4 times more software than their competitors, are more likely to use embedded software in their products, reduce defects in the software by over 50%, and reduced development times by 25%. As a result of the advantages of best in class tools and flows, 83% of these companies meet their launch deadlines, with a reduction of 13 percent in their development schedules, and 10 percent reduction in costs.
When these data points were given to GM, they quickly accepted the changes. IBM integrated electronics engineering into design function, created a platform for design, instituted or adopted standards, and provided services for tool integration to permit data transfer across tools. For GM, the streamlined design environment enabled them to include mechanical, electronics, and computer engineers into a common design environment. Together, these engineers identified needed tool functions, selected tools and methodologies that enabled increased automation throughout the normalized toolchain.
Although for tools and flows are still evolving, the creation of connectors and wrappers for interoperability will provide increased productivity for a long time. Clearly, there is great value in bringing more automation to processes and tools, but the design groups must always consider the issue of process flexibility in maintaining and upgrading the tool flows in the future.
