Lecture - A New Approach to Developing Robust Embedded Software" - Lars Bak

Date Wed, 2004-03-10 15:30
Location Universiteit Antwerpen, campus Middelheim, G010

This event is sponsored by the "Vlaams Software Platform" (VSP). The VSP stimulates innovation in the Flemish software engineering industry. It clusters industry, universities and research centers to promote networking, cooperation and information sharing. Among others, the VSP organises a series of events, including one or more lectures followed by a cocktail to stimulate some social contacts between its members.

More information about the VSP can be found at http://www.vsp-vzw.org.

 

About the Lecture

Developing software for embedded systems has until now been very static. Source code, written in C, is compiled and linked on the development platform and the resulting binary image is transferred onto the device. In an industry where robustness is paramount and dynamic software updates are required, this is simply not good enough.

This presentation will describe a new approach to developing software for embedded devices. At the bottom of the software stack we have replaced the operating system with a object-oriented virtual machine. Scheduler, interrupt handlers, device drivers, networking code and application software are executing on top of this virtual machine. We will discuss some of the design decisions behind this dynamic, lean and mean system for embedded devices. This approach solves many of the existing problems, allowing dynamic software updates and full serviceability.

We will conclude with a demonstration of the Resilient programming environment and embedded platform.

(For those of you who cannot make it on wednesday, the same lecture will be repeated on friday, march 12th at the Computer Science Department of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles)

 

About the speaker

Lars is a technology industry veteran with more than 15 years experience in virtual machine technology, product engineering and management. Prior to founding OOVM in 2002, Lars was the main architect of the Java HotSpot virtual machine at Sun Microsystems, Inc., a highly successful product with more than 50 million installations worldwide. At Sun, Lars was also the main architect of the CLDC HotSpot virtual machine, a new high-performance system for mobile phones. Lars holds a MS degree in Computer Science and is inventor on numerous patents within virtual machine technology.

More information about OOVM (the company) and Resilient (the embedded software platform) can be found at:

More information about previous virtual machine projects: