Design Tradeoffs to process compatibility:

In any system design, there are always trade-offs that need to be made. Modern embedded
systems have exceptionally interesting trades that need to be made that often result in complex
choices. Three essential trade-offs come to mind that every embedded systems developer needs
to balance carefully.

Trade-off #1 – Power Consumption Versus

System Performance in Embedded Systems

The IoT has been driving innovation within the embedded systems space for quite some time.
With that innovation has come an explosion of features and capabilities that many embedded
systems must support. For example, connectivity stacks, security, and graphic-rich interfaces,
just to name a few. While adding a lot of value to a product, all these features also have
unexpected consequences.

The need for more features results in more computing power to meet system performance
expectations. However, more processing power means more power consumption. Power
consumption is critical to battery-operated devices to maximize battery life and minimize
product maintenance in the field. The faster the battery needs to be replaced, the higher the
maintenance costs. Trading off performance and power consumption can be critical.

Now you might think you don’t have a battery, so power consumption is not a concern.
However, in a society that sees the global impact our technology has on our environment, every
device, battery-operated or connected to the grid, has an ethical responsibility to use the energy it
needs and not waste it. Failing to optimize power consumption might result in market backlash
from energy conscience consumers.

Trade-off #2 – Cost Versus Reliability

Cost is a significant driver in every product development cycle. Companies have a fixed budget
to develop their innovative product and take it to market. While established and successful
businesses may have wriggle room, start-ups and small businesses are particularly under pressure
to deliver cost-effectively.

The dramatic increase in features and connectivity has resulted in a lot more work and cost that
must go into designing and building an embedded product. Many teams are scrambling to use
what budget they have just to get the basic features into their products. Reliability and robustness
are viewed as nice to have, but the product must first get to market.

Reliability often comes at an extra cost to first put in place development and production
processes. While potentially decreasing long-term costs, these processes are often put off in the
hopes of short-term gain. The dynamic forces teams to trade off reliability and cost to achieve
their system's needed level of reliability.

Trade-off #3 – Scalability Versus Complexity

In embedded system single-purpose devices designed and built once with

short-term maintenance. They were not typically designed for reuse or
portability. Today’s systems are very different. Many companies don’t view
their embedded product as a one-off product but as a baseline platform that
will be scaled and maintained and will result in numerous products being
launched from the same code base.

Reusing existing platform code can result in a more complex software architecture.
For example, a single-release product might leverage a monolithic architecture
without issue. However, a platform that needs to scale to handle features and
market changes for a decade might need to switch to a more complex
microservices-based architecture. The microservices architecture allows great
 scalability but comes with increased complexity in design, deployment,
maintenance, and even the ability to schedule tasks.

Modern embedded systems must carefully trade off and balance their need for
scalability versus the complexity that results from scalability. An excellent place to
start is to identify how much scalability your system needs and balance it with
architectural decisions that can get you there without overly complicating your
system.

Conclusions

Modern embedded systems are complex, which results in a wide variety of

trade-offs that must be made. In this post, we discussed the three most
significant trade-offs facing many teams today:

 Power consumption versus system performance

 Cost versus reliability
 Scalability versus complexity

We may also face other trade-offs, but you’ll likely find that these three are driving
many of the design decisions you make today. Successfully balancing them will
determine whether you successfully launch a product or whether your product and
company struggle to succeed.