In an industry that is always changing, the one constant that has remained through-out my career is that developers can never get features implemented fast enough. Companies and managers have delivery dates for yesterday which puts pressure and stress on development teams to move fast. Developing fast means that short cuts will be taken, mistakes made and the end result is delays in delivery! The exact opposite desired outcome. This brings to mind an important question - what can development teams do to really decrease time-to-market?
In order to answer the question, one must first understand where all the development time goes. A traditional development cycle turns out to be relatively linear (although there are some parallel paths) starting with hardware design, driver development for the selected MCU, middleware design and integration, RTOS selection and integration, application code development and finally system testing and integration. Geez that’s a lot to do in an average one-year development cycle!
So where can we save time (and money)? If one stops to think about it for a bit or better yet, reviews their development metrics and logs, a developer would discover that driver development along with middleware and RTOS integration consume thirty percent of the development time! Can you imagine spending three to four months just getting the fundamental foundations for the system working? Something is terribly wrong with this picture. To make matters worse, every development team across the globe using that same MCU is duplicating effort by writing their own drivers, to their own standards all to get the same result; making the MCU do what it was designed to do.
Thankfully, the Renesas Synergy™ Platform developers realized this horror and solved this conundrum for developers with the Synergy Platform. The Synergy Software Package (SSP) provides qualified, production drivers for the MCU out-of-the-box. Developers now can use a standard hardware abstraction layer (HAL) to control the MCU without the need for specialized knowledge about the internal workings of the MCU. As part of the SSP, these drivers are integrated with the RTOS, middleware, application framework and other SSP components where in whole, all are fully tested and qualified for reliable operation. Renesas even warrants the operation of the SSP against the specs in the published SSP datasheet. Have you seen that from any other MCU vendor?
Using software that is pre-integrated and qualified gives a development team a leg up on their competition. Rather than rushing through the application code development, developers can now properly analyze and implement their products in a much more relaxing environment. Developers with lower stress levels are more innovative, make fewer mistakes which also leads to less debugging.
So what does this mean for developers and teams? The development cycle now has the potential to be up to thirty percent shorter! Teams can now start to focus on their product features starting on day one rather than week twelve. There is not only opportunity to get to market early, perhaps beating a close competitor and gaining crucial market share, but the option for utilizing that extra time to create additional innovation that further differentiates a company’s product. (Let’s not forget the cost savings associated with funding a team also).
What sounds preferable to you, a high stress and long development cycle or a relaxed, highly innovative environment ripe with opportunity?
Tip of the Week-
The SSP User’s Manual has a HAL Layer Users Guide that provides a description, an overview of implementation options, and guides showing how to write an application using the HAL module, and how to configure the module clocks, pins, interrupts, and driver. A list of properties, such as channel, bit rates and addresses, are also all identified to make it as easy as possible to create just the module you need for your application.
https://www.renesas.com/en-us/doc/products/renesas-synergy/doc/r01us0171eu0094_synergy_ssp.pdf