Embedded System Architecting

Synopsis

Consumer electronic and now computer products have permeated virtually every market segment. While still expected to be low cost, robust and user-friendly, today's consumer products are highly complex incorporating the latest technology. Product life cycle is also dramatically shortened with keen competition for customers' attention. With high shipping volume and correspondingly high stake, there is no room for mistake in every phase of the product creation process.

For product based industries, proper management of the product creation process is important for success. The product creation process includes market analysis of customers' needs, specification and requirement determination, product development, manufacturing, sales and delivery and finally field support.

System architects are people who combine a very broad technical background and lots of experience with psychosocial skills and a good understanding of the business. He is the technical team's interface to the marketing and business creation team. He translates qualitative market and business requirements into rigorous technical specifications. He performs system level design and partitioning which ultimately determines the products' technical success, both in design and eventual manufacturing. He manages the product family to facilitate efficient sales configuration. He is the critical link that determines the success or failure of a product.

The objective of the course is to present system architecting within the product creation process. It demonstrates the tools as well as the additional skill and know-how that the system architect must acquire to fully discharge his responsibility in creating an integral system wide design based on vision and properly mapped outline of development activities to be carried out by multi-disciplinary teams.

Course Outline

The Product Creation Process?

• Phases of the product creation process
• Stakeholders and definition of roles
• Requirement specifications at each stages of the product creation process
• Review of best Practices
• Managing risk

The System Architecting Process

• The job scope of a system architect and the product creation team
• Data collection methods
• Information processing and analysis
• Conceptual architecture and development models
• Requirement management process
• An integrated architecting process
• Roadmapping

UML Concepts in System Architecting and Design

• Review of UML diagrams
• UML in the architecting process
• UML in the application design process
• An integrated design and documentation process

Translation to technical specification

• Gender-neutral technical specification
• Translation of system requirements to implementation specifications
• Scenario simulations and completeness verification

Towards the Technical Starting Block

• Preparing the requirement document
• Tapping design patterns
• Using Components

Product Families and Generic development

• Introduction
• Planned variety
• Computer support in product development
• A generic information platform
• Describing product family

Hardware architecture

• Classification of processing platforms and elements
• Selection and optimisation of platform
• Application domain specific processors
• Customised application specific processors

Resource estimation and partitioning

• Estimating software execution time
• Effects of performance enhancement features on execution times.
• Hardware / software partitioning

Software Design and Architecture

• Software design principles
• Architectural patterns
• Examples

Concurrency and scheduling

• Determining concurrency and real-time requirements
• Scheduling to meet requirements
• Principle of RTOS
• Targeting of application to RTOS

Instructional Methodology

Course is delivered using Outreach: Lesson Global Campus platform. It is a blend of traditional classroom teaching, abet that it is delivered via the virtual classroom of Outreach Lesson platform. Please click this link for a one-page summary of the virtual classroom.

Assessment in the course consists of two parts. The first part is formative assessment where there is a short quiz following every section of the course. These quizzes are designed to perform self assessment on whether you have correctly understood the content of the course.

The second part is summative and consist of a project. You will need to perform a project related to the industry you are 12 June, 2008 a new embedded product. You will need to prepare reports and make presentations on your finding using Outreach presentation tools. These reports and presentation will be organised into a Personal Digital Portfolio DVD upon your successful completion of the course together with your Graduate Certificate. This multimedia portfolio will be the conclusive evidence that you have achieved competence as a embedded system architect.

Expected Outcome

At the end of this course, system architects will:

• gain a wider overview of the creation chain.
• have a better understanding of the relationship with upstream roles such as project leaders, marketing managers and technology managers.
• have a better appreciation of downstream roles such as hardware and software architects.
• learn the techniques to transit seamlessly from upstream roles to downstream roles.

Non-system architects will:

• have a better appreciation of the system architecting function and improve the working relationship with the system architect.
• have a better understanding of the output of the system architect and be better prepared to integrate seamlessly into the product creation process.