Byte Paradigm conducted a survey in 2009 with over 300 respondents involved in embedded hardware and software design. This survey shows that:
- A majority of engineers (61%) agree with the statement that 'Using a hardware prototype speeds up embedded system debug'. Only less than 10% of the total respondents (335 total) somewhat disagree or disagree with this statement (see table 2).
- Over 83% of the total number of respondents declare that stimulus generation is at least 'as challenging as system response observation'. Figures are sensibly the same whether it concerns IP, FPGA, ASIC, SoC, or full embedded system testing (see figure 2, which presents an average view).
A vast majority of development engineers like going to a 'real hardware' prototype to test and debug what they are designing. Basically, 'testing on prototype' always reduces to 'stimulating and observing'.
Interestingly, this survey also shows that engineers are usually well-equipped with oscilloscopes (69.5% of the respondents), logic analyzers (57.1% of the respondents)
and JTAG probes (59.3% of the respondents).
On the other hand, only 20.6% of our respondents find a digital pattern generator in the lab to perform their testing and debugging work. This number rises to 32.8% as for waveform generators – for analog signal generation such as sine waves. When asked about this situation, preliminary results show that engineers will be more eager to use standard commercially-available signal sources for stimulus generation for future projects. In retrospect, they also acknowledge that they would have saved valuable design time if they had used a digital pattern generator for functional testing and debugging of their last digital system.
The reason why engineers are not systematically equipped with such a tool – whereas they always receive a PC and a oscilloscope – is not very clear.
Every engineer should have a digital pattern generator
"At Byte Paradigm, we consider that digital pattern generators help overcome the many challenges of embedded system test, debug and validation." - Says Frederic Leens from Byte Paradigm.
We share the opinion of the engineers that going on prototype early in the design cycle speeds up system debug and hence, helps shorten the overall product design cycle. Testing a prototyped system basically requires 2 types of tasks: 1) Generating the input stimulus to the system, and 2) Analyzing the system's response.
To solve the 'stimulus-and-response' challenge the engineer will save valuable design time if he is correctly equipped. There is no doubt that scopes, logic analyzers and perhaps more specialized analyzers will help doing the 'analysis job'. They have an important companion for digital systems: the digital pattern generator.