Components @ work: component technology for embedded systems

The use of component-based software development is getting more common for desktop applications to speed up time to market and reduce development costs. Especially, in the area of embedded real-time systems the reuse of tested and robust parts of prior applications is of great desire, to fulfil the strong requirements on maturity, availability and cost. However, further requirements like low power design and real-time execution of components makes it impossible to use component frameworks well known in the desktop area. This paper discusses the problems of component-based software development for embedded real-time systems and derives requirements for a component framework for this domain. First insights for such a framework are presented.