Creating a software-defined version of ADI

Embedded World this year has had a quite clear focus on the massive growth in the application space of edge computing and the convergence of IoT, AI, security, and underlying sensor technologies. A stop by the Analog Devices Inc (ADI) booth reveals quite clearly that the company aims to address the challenges of heterogeneous debugging and security compliance in embedded systems. “For some companies, an intelligent edge refers to the network edge or the cloud edge, for us it means right down to sensing, taking raw data off sensors and converting them into insights,” says Jason Griffin, managing director of software engineering and security solutions at ADI. “So bridging the physical and digital words, that’s our sweet spot.” ADI aims to bolster embedded solutions and security software where “as the signal chain becomes more digital, we add on complex security layers.” As an established leader in the semiconductor industry, ADI’s foundational components now require more software enablement, “so as we move up the stack, moving closer to our customer’s application layer, we’re starting to add an awful lot more software where our overall goal is to create a software-defined version of ADI and meet customers at their software interface.” The company is focusing their efforts on open source development “we’re open sourcing all our tools because we truly believe that software developers should own their own pipeline.” 

Enter CodeFusion Studio

This is where CodeFusion Studio comes into play, the software development environment was built to help develop applications on all ADI digital technologies. “In the future, it will include analog too,” notes Jason. “There’s three main components to CodeFusion Studio: the software development kit that includes usage guides and reference guides to get up and running; the modern Visual Studio Code IDE so customers can go to the Microsoft marketplace and download it to facilitate heterogenous debug and application development;  and a series of configuration and productivity tools where we will continue to expand CodeFusion Studio.” The initial release of this software includes a pin config tool, ELF file explorer, and a heterogeneous debug tool.  

Config tools

Kevin Townsend, embedded systems engineer offered a deeper dive into the open source platform starting with the config tools. “There’s not a ton of differentiation in the config tools themselves, every vendor is going to give you options to configure pin mux, pin config, and generate code to take those config choices and set up your device to solve your business problem.” The config tools themselves are more or less standard, “in reality, you have two problems with pin mux and pin config: you’ve got to capture your config choices, and every tool will do that for you, for example, I could want ADC6 on Pin B4, or UART TXD and RXD on C7 and D9, the problem with most of those tools today is that they lock you into a very opinionated sense of what that code should look like. So most vendors will generate code for you like everybody else but it will be based on the vendor-specific choices of RTOSs (real-time operating systems), my SDKs; and if I’m a moderately complex-to-higher-end customer, I don’t want to have anything to do with those, I need to generate code for my own scheduler, my own APIs in-house.” 

So CodeFusion Studio’s tool has done is decouple config choice capture from code generation, “we save all of the config choices for your system, we save all of that into a JSON file which is human and machine readable and rather than just generating opinionated code for you right away, we have an extensible command-line utility that takes this JSON file and it will generate code for you based upon the platform that you want.” The choices can include MSDK (microcontrollers SDK), Zephyr 3.7, ThreadX, or an in-house scheduler maybe used by a larger tech company. “I can take this utility and we have a plug-in based architecture where it’s relatively trivial for me to write my own export engine.” This gives people the freedom to generate the code they need. 

Figure 1: CodeFusion Studio Config tool demo at the ADI booth at Embedded World 2024.

ELF file explorer

Kevin bemoaned that half of a software developer’s day was spent doing meetings while the other half was spent doing productive work where so much of that already-reduced time had to include debug, profiling, and instrumentation. “That’s kind of the bread and butter of doing software development but traditionally, I don’t feel like embedded has tried to innovate on debug, it’s half of my working day and yet we’re still using 37-year-old tools like gdb on the command line to debug the system we’re using.” 

He says “if I want to have all my professional profiling tools to understand where all my SRAM or flash is going, I have to buy an expensive proprietary tool.” Kevin strongly feels that making a difference for ADI customers does not involve selling another concrete tool but an open platform that does not simply generate code, but to generates code that enables customers to get the best possible usage of their resources. “MCUs are a commodity at the end of the day, people are going to buy them for a specific set of peripherals, but it’s a lot of work to get the best possible usage out of them.” 

The ELF file explorer is one such example to improve the quality of life for developers. The ELF file is analogous to the .exe file for Windows desktop application, “it’s like an embedded .exe” , says Kevin. “It is kind of the ultimate source of the truth of the code that I am running on my device but it is a block box.” ELF file explorer attempts to take these opaque systems and build “windows” into them so see what is going on in the final binary. “There’s nothing in this tool that I couldn’t do on the command line but I would need 14 different tools, an Excel spreadsheet, and a piece of paper with pencil, and it would take me three hours.” Instead, developers can finalize debugging in a fraction of the time to potentially speed up time-to-market. 

“So for example, I can see the 10 largest symbols inside my image where I’m running out of flash; where is it all going?” In this case, the tool allows the user to readily see the 10 largest functions (Figure 2) with the ability to right click on it to go to the symbol source and get a view directly into the source code. 

Figure 2: CodeFusion Studio ELF file explorer tool demo.

Heterogenous Debug

The heterogenous debug tool is aimed at simplifying multi-core architecture debugging, this is quickly becoming a necessity in modern embedded development environments where implementing 2 cores or beyond is becoming commonplace. Kevin Townsend explains “almost all the debug tools that exist in the MCU space today are designed for one core at a time, they’re designed to solve one and analyze one thread of data on one architecture. You could have a design with an Arm core, a RISC-V core, an Xtensa DSP core, and maybe some proprietary instruction set from a vendor, all on the same chip; and I need to trace data as it moves through the system in a very complex way.” An example is used with an analog front end that goes to DSP for processing and then to an Arm core for further processing, and a final RISC-V core that might control a BLE radio to send a signal out to a mobile device. 

“It breaks down the ability to debug multiple cores in parallel inside the same IDE, in the same moment in time”, this diverges from the traditional approach with different IDEs, pipelines, and debuggers where the developer has to set a breakpoint on one core and switch over the the next processor’s tools to continue the debug process. This process is inherently cumbersome and fraught with human error and oversight where quite often, different cores might be controlled with different JTAG connectors causing the developer to manually switch connections as well while switching (alt-tabbing) between tools. 

In the heterogenous debug tool, users with multiple debuggers connected to multiple cores can readily visualize code for all the cores (there is no limit to the number) and they can set breakpoints on each (Figure 3). Once the offending line of code is found and fixed, the application can be rebuilt with the change and run to ensure that it works. 

Figure 3: The heterogenous debug tool demo at showing how a user can debug a system using a RISC-V and Arm core to play the game 2048. 

Trusted Edge Security Architecture

“We have our Trusted Edge Architecture which we’re embedding into our SDK as well as having security tooling within CodeFusion Studio itself, its all SDK-driven APIs so customers can use it pretty easily,” said Jason Griffin. Kevin Townsend also adds “traditional embedded engineers haven’t had to deal with the complexities of security, but now you have all this legislation coming down the pipeline there is a pressure that has never existed before for software developers to deliver secure solutions and they often don’t have the expertise.” The Trusted Edge Security Architecture is a program that offers access to crypto libraries all embedded within the software that can be used on an MCU (Figure 4). The secure hardware solutions include tamper-resistant key storage, root of trust (RoT), and more to provide a secure foundation for embedded devices. “How do we give you, out of the box, something that complies with 90% of the requirements in cybersecurity,” says Kevin, “We can’t solve everything, but we really need to raise the bar in the software libraries and software components that we integrate into our chips to really reduce the pressure on software developers.” 

Figure 4: ADI Trusted Edge Security Architecture demo.

Aalyia Shaukat, associate editor at EDN, has worked in design publishing industry for six years. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology, and has published works in major EE journals as well as trade publications.

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