Distributed cooperative design method and environment for embedded system

Embedded system is the application specific computing system that embedded in other application, to perform some special information processing functionalities. Embedded system is composed of software part (including embedded system software and application software) and hardware part (including embedded processors, memory, ASICs, IO circuit et al). In order to ensure design quality and efficiency of embedded system, it not only requires the designers to do hardware/software co-design, but also requires experts from different domains to cooperate. Existing embedded system design methods and environments mainly support hardware/software co-design, but they can´t support the cooperation among experts from different domains. In this paper, we present a distributed cooperative design method for embedded system and developed the corresponding design environment, main features are: We employ mobile agent and Web service technology to establish the distributed cooperative design environment. This distributed network environment can support experts from different domains perform embedded system virtual prototyping modeling and simulation, hardware/software partitioning and performance evaluation cooperatively, this environment also supports traditional embedded system hardware/software co-design and design reusing method. Application experiment on the embedded system design of satellite navigation and positioning device indicate that, our distributed cooperative design method and design environment of embedded system improves the design quality and efficiency greatly.