Dave Lacey

Interview with Dave Lacey – Technical Director of Software Tools at XMOS

http://www.eeweb.com/spotlight/interview-with-dave-lacey

A lot of the work done in system programming revolves around deadlines, which makes “real time programming” a key factor in system design. Generally, real-time programming is coding a system where some of the actions of the system must meet specific deadlines. These deadlines may be internal or…

In a previous article I went over the basics of handling clocks in software. This month the theme will be continued as I look at global clock recovery, distributed clock synchronization and event synchronization.

Suppose you have two processes: a server and a client. The server process reads some I/O from a hardware interface and passes the data on to a client process. These processes may or may not be running on separate processors.

Clocks are standard concepts for hardware designers but less familiar to software engineers. However, in embedded programming (and particularly real-time embedded programming) software developers have to handle clocks in their software programs.

Usually embedded systems programmers and boxers do not draw many comparisons. However, in one aspect they do. Boxers need to fight within a particular weight limit—so their challenge is to maximize their performance (build muscle) within their specified allowance. Embedded systems are similar;…

This article is the first in a series on software development and particularly programming for embedded systems and real-time applications. Future articles will naturally refer to XMOS technology from time to time, so to start things off it makes sense to look at the world of software that XMOS…