a deterministic preemptive kernel and a small memory footprint. Somewhere in the mix there is an ideal candidate for your application and hardware. One thing is certain: Before selecting your OS, know exactly the intentions of your application and the hardware you plan to use.
How will the device be used? One way to minimize risk when developing your embedded system is to first consider its use cases – not just how the end- user will interact with it, but also how it will be designed, developed, and tested. Will the device be used primarily by a healthcare provider, by the patient at home, or both?
Does the device have communication modes or is it purely a stand-alone? Depending on its communication needs, you may find that your preferred OS includes many of the modes you need, or you might prefer another OS, in which case you’ll have to port over the communications stack and/or the driver to attain the right mix of communications software.
Are there any real-time needs identified? For some devices, there is no requirement for real-time behavior. If an interrupt is serviced 100 milliseconds late, the results may be delayed by 100 milli- seconds, but that’s not going to cause a failure. However, if it’s a laser involved in eye surgery, this can have catastrophic effects if the laser does not turn on and off at the precise time. If the laser has eye tracking guidance, the laser must move in lockstep with a predefined pattern even in the presence of eye movement.
Perhaps the device is a critical piece of equipment, so there is minimal sensitivity to cost. On the contrary, a device that is hand- held and sold in the millions has a high sensitivity to cost. These types of considerations will directly affect the need to minimize BOM, which in turn results in possibly minimizing the memory you’ll need to effectively build the complete application with some margin.
It’s all about the hardware Once the use cases have been defined, it’s time to find the appropriate hardware. Medical systems can be extremely small, with an 8-bit microcontroller clocked at less than 25 MHz, and use only 8K of memory. More complex designs can include feature-rich SoCs clocked in the hundreds of MHz and mega- bytes of memory. The range of systems encompasses hybrid systems that have special purpose processors or DSPs to systems that include numerous multicore chips.
What’s best for your design comes out of the use cases and expectations on how you want the system to behave.
Is multicore necessary? To the two main reasons that come to mind for selecting multicore – pure processing performance and low power manage- ment – a third could well be added, the combination of the two.
If you’re concerned with low power you may want to use a multicore SoC simply because it can utilize all the available
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