Tapping Linux as an application framework for consumer electronics
In the highly competitive consumer-electronics industry, product life cycles are notoriously short, and downward price pressures are constant. As a result, electronics manufacturers must produce consumer devices faster than ever and reduce overall costs and time to market.
By Benoit Schillings, Trolltech -- EDN, October 26, 2006
Consumers today have demonstrated an insatiable appetite for new electronic gadgets—from mobile phones to media players to car navigation systems. At this year's International Consumer Electronics Show alone, consumer-electronics manufacturers unveiled more than 20,000 new products. Consumers are forever raising the bar of expectation for electronic devices, demanding that companies be more responsive to their needs. It's no wonder that a continuous drive toward innovation characterizes the electronics industry, more than any other. To beat the competition in this business environment, electronics manufacturers must keenly focus on product design and developing innovative devices that are relevant and that resonate with consumers.
Although many consumers continue to think of electronic devices simply in terms of the outward-facing physical structure and style of these hardware platforms, the most innovative and successful products on the consumer-electronics market owe much of their success and popularity to the software component for their ingenuity and differentiation. When looking at the development costs for embedded devices, software remains the single most expensive portion and most difficult system component to manage. Without question, software—not hardware—has emerged as the dominant factor in the cost, time to market, and risk of the product development of electronic devices.
Exponential change
Developers of embedded devices have traditionally created their own in-house software, which was relatively simple and targeted increasing the performance of these stand-alone devices. They essentially created devices with simple, single-function applications and hardware-centric designs, which they often built on single-processor architectures. However, that approach has changed significantly over the last few years. A trend toward growing software complexity characterizes today's embedded devices, in which embedded software represents the bulk of the development cost and schedule. In the past, developing software from scratch for each embedded-system project was the norm. This do-it-yourself model was straightforward and worked well for many years. Now, that old way of embedded programming has given way to the need to reuse software and build on software using commercial third-party applications.
The mobile and wireless market is one of the key drivers of consumer electronics. These days, it's not uncommon for smart phones to have millions of lines of software code. (For more on smart phones, see this issue's cover story, "Mobile makeover.") Given this level of complexity, it's not surprising that many electronics manufacturers now employ more software engineers than hardware engineers. After all, software makes a consumer-electronics device more flexible and usable, and the user interface, which the software supports, ultimately has the most impact on the quality of the user experience.
Driving the consumer-electronics market is a strong demand to maximize the user-interface experience with applications that require richer content, resulting in devices that have greater software complexity. Nevertheless, an electronic device can have all the functions in the world, but usability is the feature that differentiates a successful product from an unsuccessful one. Having the software-development tools to create a high-quality experience is critical to creating devices that will be successful in the market.
The Linux solution
Because manufacturers now base the differentiation of consumer-electronics devices on the user interface, the need for a flexible application framework is increasingly paramount to meet requirements. The problems for electronics manufacturers are how to continue to attract consumers with enticing new features for their devices, manage the development process, minimize risks, and handle cost and time-to-market constraints. Selecting a software platform is the most important decision a consumer-electronics manufacturer makes in the design process. Manufacturers are increasingly looking to Linux as a platform on which to standardize development, significantly cutting cost and time to market and retaining control over the features and functions of their devices. Linux has emerged as a mainstream technology in the embedded-system world and is the fastest growing operating system in the mobile-device market. The choice to go with Linux and the tools that support it has profound implications for the electronics industry, which has—with good reason—adopted Linux for mobile phones, PDAs, and other consumer devices.
Open-source Linux is robust, powerful, fast, secure, and free. The open-Linux standards are widely available, support reuse, and provide increased compatibility with technologies from other vendors. These tangible benefits from Linux represent an opportunity for consumer-electronics manufacturers to speed their product-development efforts and to provide devices to the market that are both low-cost and easy to use.
Independent research company Venture Development Corp has forecast that the market for embedded-software services for Linux-based devices will continue on an upward trend through 2007. In a recent report, VDC notes several factors, including demand from developers for access to and control of source code, which the open-source software model permits, helping to drive demand for Linux in the embedded-system market. VDC also notes developers' demand for royalty-free runtime software.
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A plethora of consumer-electronic devices has incorporated Linux. Leading Chinese telecom manufacturer and wireless provider ZTE recently announced the advanced Linux-based e3 smart phone, which most in the industry consider one of the most important smart-phone projects in China. Motorola's A760 smart phone in 2003 was the first handset from the company to use Linux, making the open-source operating system the cornerstone of Motorola's software strategy for mobile devices. Scores of other leading electronics manufacturers have followed suit, lending credibility to Linux (figure 1, figure 2, and figure3).
Innovate and differentiate
With full source code and documentation available, developers working with embedded Linux can easily modify and integrate other technologies to create distinctive electronics devices, freeing them to focus on value-adding innovation rather than on maintaining software. However, using Linux as a kernel is insufficient for manufacturers to truly innovate and differentiate products. Application developers must use an application framework that includes a powerful, rich, and fully documented API (application-programming interface). An API provides a defined method for developing application software, greatly simplifying software development and reducing development cost and time.
Hardware-independent APIs enable consumer-device manufacturers to write an application once and deploy it across many platforms—an important feature. When it comes to consumer devices, manufacturers are constantly changing the hardware. Apple has changed its successful iPod hardware at least five times since launching in 2001. October 2005 marked the release of the fifth-generation iPod model. By the same token, consumer-electronics manufacturers can't afford a situation in which their software implementation has hardware limitations. Having minimal hardware dependencies that can run unchanged on most standard embedded-Linux setups is optimal, but being able to take advantage of hardware-specific accelerations is also beneficial.
For instance, application frameworks must dynamically take advantage of graphics acceleration, or availability of multiple CPUs. In other words, these frameworks must provide a good abstraction for the hardware without compromising the efficient use of hardware resources. A framework should make it easier to take advantage of the full potential of the hardware, especially in a case of multiple hardware platforms. Device makers need a robust, customizable development platform for creating complex-application devices that embedded Linux powers. This application framework should include a comprehensive set of libraries and graphical tools to help organizations quickly and cost-effectively create embedded-Linux-based products. Linux and this kind of open-source-development platform can reduce fragmentation and the lifetime costs of divergent product lines. In addition, the application framework should build on the security features of Linux to protect the integrity of devices and the network when downloading and running native applications.
A cross-platform application framework should also offer a well-defined development environment for new features, including input methods, fonts, modem drivers, media codecs, and other facilities. It must also include pre-integrated applications, allowing manufacturers and designers to build feature-packed devices. The trend is to increase the features of devices and lower the per-unit cost. Device manufacturers are competing to create products that incorporate the latest technology that can accommodate media-rich content and bring them to the market before their competitors do. These device manufacturers are in the unenviable position of having to add new cutting-edge features and software to their products and operate under constant pressure to reduce the time for designing, prototyping, testing, and manufacturing these increasingly complex devices.
The market for consumer-electronics devices, in which user interfaces play a critical role in customer adoption, is seeing explosive growth due to Linux and application frameworks that ease and speed up development of these devices. Linux provides manufacturers with a great degree of independence and control—attributes that have quickly led to Linux's becoming a standard platform for device design.
