Going to 32 and 64 Bits Embedded software tools ready to roll By Richard Goering, EE Times San Jose, Calif. -- As vendors showcase the latest advances in development tools at this week's Embedded Systems Conference, a quiet revolution is brewing, one that may propel a small and relatively immature tool market into a period of explosive growth. One catalyst for this change is the increasing use of 32-bit and 64-bit embedded processors. While estimates of its size vary, the market for embedded software-development tools is much smaller than that for EDA despite the far larger number of software engineers than hardware designers on design teams. The reasons for that include a long history with in-house tools and real-time operating systems (RTOSes), a low cost per seat and an unwillingness to paying significant sums for tools. Just getting a handle on the size of the development-tool market is difficult. Paul Zorfass, analyst at International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.), said the tool market was just under $700 million in 1995 and will grow to $1.6 billion in 2000. These numbers include both commercial and proprietary compilers, debuggers and emulators, though no RTOSes. Zorfass said that only a small portion of the market is proprietary. Very different numbers come from Wessels, Arnold & Henderson (Minneapolis). They show an embedded-software market of $2.5 billion for 1996, of which only about 12 percent, or $300 million, was commercial. That market is expected to grow to $5.2 billion by 2001, of which 28 percent will be commercial. The figures include software tools and RTOSes, but not emulators. "The problem with this market is that most people are guessing," said Raj Gollarmudi, analyst at Wessels, Arnold. "It's hard to get real numbers. We have extrapolations based on very few data points." Gollarmudi said he thought the IDC numbers were too high. One difference, however, is that the IDC numbers include some products used in the embedded market but not specifically designed for it, like Borland C++ compilers. But Zorfass and Gollarmudi agree that the development-tool market is headed for rapid growth, and both pointed to 32-bit and 64-bit processors as a key reason. Zorfass said there could be 250 million such processors in circulation by 2000. They allow much more complex software than their 8- and 16-bit cousins so the "roll-your-own" approach to tool and RTOS development is less likely to work. Most growth, Gollarmudi said, will be in tools, not RTOSes. That's because tools have become the key differentiator for people choosing a commercial RTOS. Indeed, three of the largest providers--Wind River Systems, Integrated Systems Inc. (ISI) and Microtec--all offer development systems that are closely tied to their operating systems. Gollarmudi said that Wind River (Alameda, Calif.) is "without a question" the market leader in the combined tool/RTOS area. ISI (Sunnyvale, Calif.) is probably next, but lost some momentum by being late to market with its Prism+ tools, he said. And Microtec (San Jose), a Mentor Graphics Corp. subsidiary, stalled in the past three years because it didn't move quickly enough to support new processors, Gollarmudi said. By any estimate, the embedded development-tool market is considerably smaller than the EDA market, estimated at $2.3 billion in 1996 by the Electronic Design Automation Companies (EDAC). One reason, said Zorfass, is that the cost per seat is much lower. (Next article) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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