OS porting and application development for SoC

By Adrian Peirson,
Senior Engineer, Software Systems,
ARM.

Combining the flexibility of an SoC platform and a pre-ported standard OS offers deigners ‘the best of both worlds'

To deliver improved usability in high-end portable consumer products, the use of an appropriate consumer operating system (OS) is becoming far more widespread. Using a commercially supported OS also vastly increases the availability of supported applications. For the device developer, this trend adds major complexity to the problem of system implementation. Porting a complete operating system to a new hardware design adds significantly to the development burden, increasing both time-to-market and expense. Even for those familiar with the integration of a real-time OS, the porting, validation and support of a complex platform OS is a formidable task.