Components for Embedded Devices

Software is more and more becoming the major cost factor for embedded devices. Already today, software accounts for more than 50 percent of the development costs of such a device. However, software development practices in this area lag far behind those typically applied in the information systems development domain. Reuse is hardly ever heard of in some areas, development from scratch is common practice and component-based software is usually a foreign word. PECOS is a collaborative project between industrial and research partners that seeks to enable component-based technology for a certain class of embedded systems known as “field devices” by taking into account the specific properties of this application area. In this paper we introduce a component model for field device software. Furthermore we report on the PECOS component composition language CoCo and the mapping from CoCo to Java and C++. We conclude by giving an overview on the PECOS software development process.