Towards managing hardware - software dependencies in embedded systems

Modern embedded applications demand increasingly complex systems. Therefore a typical embedded system today usually consists of a mixture between hardware and software components. The hardware can further be divided into "hard-wired" parts as defined by e.g. the PCB (printed circuit board) and into "soft-wired" parts such as FPGA (field programmable gate array) images. On top of this sit the software components that make use of the functionality delivered by the various hardware parts. In practice, all of the mentioned parts of a system are not necessarily static but get updates from time to time. Unfortunately, a later FPGA image might not fit to an earlier software version or the other way round. This article describes methods and lessons learned in practice with regard to version marking of the various system components.