“Recently, embedded system designs have become more complex and larger in size.”

Lee Hyun-do, sales manager at IAR Systems, said this while explaining embedded software development trends at a recent webinar titled 'IAR's Solutions for Embedded Software Development' hosted by e4ds EEWbinar.

The automotive paradigm shift to electric vehicles and software-defined vehicles (SDVs) is beginning, and the industrial landscape is changing. Manager Lee Hyeon-do said, “Due to the recent shift to electric vehicles, various companies are jumping into the electric vehicle-related market,” and added that the market scope is expanding to include companies in telecommunications and home appliances that were not relevant in the era of traditional internal combustion engine vehicles.

In the automotive industry, it is most important to meet the requirements for 'functional safety', which is different from cloud native development in existing mobile and server environments. The manager also emphasized this point, pointing out that “embedded SW installed in automotive applications must satisfy stringent safety certification requirements.”

IAR emphasized that the important things in embedded SW development are ▲quality ▲safety ▲security, and especially ▲compliance with safety certification and standards is important in the development of mission-critical products such as automobiles ▲railways ▲medical devices. IAR supports developers by providing guidelines on how to use tools for safety certification and compliance with standards.

Regarding the fact that IoT product development that connects to the communication environment regardless of wired or wireless, including electric vehicles and SDVs, has become mainstream even in general products, Manager Lee Hyeon-do mentioned that “there may be many security issues in the future,” suggesting preparation for security issues in embedded development.

IAR announced that it is planning safety certification solutions through various partnerships in addition to safety certification solutions. It raised expectations by saying that it will introduce several safety certification solutions in the second half of this year.

In addition, as embedded systems become more complex and larger in size, the total amount of code used in modern automobiles has increased to 2 to 3 million due to multi-functional applications and SW stacks installed in vehicles.

According to Steve McConnell's book 'Code Complete', 'The average developer creates 70 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, and about 20% of them end up in the hands of customers' and 'It takes 30 times longer to fix a bug than to write a line of code'.

There can be no defects (bugs) in SW design and development. However, how to develop while minimizing these bugs is a constant challenge and concern for developers.

IAR believes that minimizing and eliminating bugs during the development phase is the best option in terms of cost and human resource efficiency. Accordingly, the IAR debugging solution supports the process of minimizing bugs through testing during the development phase.

When looking at the cost of bug fixing, the cost increases in the order of 'development < build < QA and testing < mass production', and if the debugging cost is $80 during the development phase, the cost increases exponentially when the product is mass-produced, reaching $7,200, IAR explained.

The manager said, “There are analysis functions that can statically and dynamically analyze code under the IDE development environment, so SW developers can use static analysis after writing code to check whether the written code has problems, whether it contains inherent risks, and whether it was developed in accordance with the coding rule set.” He added, “Customers are highly satisfied with these code analysis functions because they can test for operational problems after actual product development in a single development tool.”

Due to the rapid increase in the number of codes due to multi-functionality and platformization in advanced IT devices including automobiles, tools supporting debugging solutions are essential as people cannot individually visit and fix bugs.

Manager Lee Hyeon-do said, “IAR supports 15,000 MCUs including Arm, RISC-V, ST, TI, and NXP, covering virtually all MCUs on the market.” He added, “We don’t use just one MCU per project; a variety of MCUs are utilized in new projects. The IAR development environment allows for universal application with a single tool, making development much easier.”

Meanwhile, IAR Systems, a company headquartered in Uppsala, Sweden, attracted market attention by commercializing the first 8051 compiler. We focus our business on solutions and support related to software development environments, and provide SW development products and solutions such as embedded workbench, visual state, and debugging solutions. We operate 13 branches around the world, including Korea.