Software re-use is leading to some horrendously clunky software being put into products, said executives at the
Globalpress Summit conference in Monterey last week.
“My cell phone contains every piece of source code the manufacturer has written since 1990. I have to carry around this huge piece of legacy junk,” complained Bill Chown, director of system level design at Mentor Graphics, who was sitting on the embedded software panel at the Globalpress Summit conference.
Every panelist talked about the amount of software being put into products, the huge amount of resource needed to write it, and the consequent importance of re-use.
“Software design costs are higher than hardware design costs,” said Siby Abraham, v-p at Wipro. “We need engineers who don’t see themselves as hardware or software engineers, but understand both.”
Jack Browne, v-p at MIPS, said 30 to 50 per cent of R&D budgets were spent on software, and the cost was rising 20 per
cent a year. “The software effort overtakes the hardware effort at 130nm,” said Brown.
Steve Roddy, v-p at Tensilica, said: “Some say we’re at a crisis stage with the software side overwhelming the hardware side.” Driving some of this is the proliferation of cores in system-on-chip (SoC) devcies.
Roddy quoted the ITRS that the average number of programmable devices in SoCs is now 32. Using Tensilica’s software, a 0.13µm chip containing 192 processors has been made for Cisco, said Roddy.
The problem is that, while the amount of code written has risen 46 per cent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) in recent years, the amount of people writing code has risen 7 per cent CAGR.