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Due to our strong presence on hardware design services and our relationship with semiconductor companies, SoCtronics embedded software teams also have a strong understanding of hardware architectures, processors, interfaces, peripherals, power and clocking architectures. The teams have experience in getting involved from an early hardware architecture phase to influence the design from a software, application and use-case perspective, and co-develop the software along with the hardware development. Teams have experience working on various FPGA and silicon platforms, work closely with hardware and board teams to debug complex issues and develop power and performance optimized software.

OS Porting

SoCtronics Platform Software group has experience in bringing-up and working with various real-time Operating Systems and Linux based systems. When a new silicon is being designed, the teams work with the hardware designers in the development of BootROM and Boot loaders. We develop all the CPU level initialization code and platform specific portions of the OS required for OS to function on a new platform.

CPU architectures

  • ARM Cortex-A*
  • ARM Cortex-M*
  • MIPS
  • RISC-V
  • x86
  • Tensilica Xtensa
  • TI

Operating Systems

  • Linux
  • Android
  • FreeRTOS
  • ThreadX
  • Nucleus
  • Keil RTX
  • NuttX
  • Contiki

BSP & Drivers

SoCtronics Platform Software group has a rich experience working on a wide variety of interfaces and peripherals. The peripheral and interface drivers are written to suit the OS specific device driver framework and are written to handle all functional use-cases and power management requirements as per the device and system power states.

interfaces and devices

  • USB
  • Display Port
  • Ethernet
  • MIPI-CSI
  • MIPI-DSI
  • PCIe
  • HDMI
  • BT
  • WiFi
  • Flash
  • NAND
  • I2C
  • I2S
  • SPI
  • UART

Firmware

The Platform Software group also supports complete firmware development to cater to the end application ex: smart watch, smart lights, VR headset, smart connected speakers etc. This involves expertise in areas such as integration of networking / IoT stacks, porting of file-systems, multimedia middleware, Amazon AVS integration, applications etc.

Low-power is one of the critical needs of most of the connected devices today. The group specializes in the implementation of the entire system level power states and associated functionalities such as suspend/resume etc., dynamic power management controlling different power islands, clock and voltage scaling etc., to achieve the lowest possible power consumption possible with the given hardware architecture.

Apart from working with new custom silicon, the team also works with various off the shelf SoCs from different vendors to realize the final solutions for the customers. The team has experience in identifying the right components for the end solution and developing the required firmware based on these off the shelf

standard platforms

  • Various STM32 based platforms
  • Raspberry Pi platforms
  • Beaglebone platforms

Wearable SoC

Case-study

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Wearables have become popular over the past few years, devices like smart watches, fitness trackers and etc. are generally used devices now-a-days. One can connect smart watch to their phone and can monitor all notifications like emails, messages, phone calls on smart watch itself without looking at your phone, also these devices can provide lot of information like step-count, blood pressure and etc. Soctronics made ultra low-power ASIC for Wearable products and developed entire software required for smart watch. System contains three-core (MIPS) heterogeneous architecture with each core running a different OS.

Work involved:

  1. Boot ROM and Boot loader development
  2. Pre-silicon Validation
  3. SoC bring-up
  4. Board design for SoC validation, software development & form factor designs
  5. Development and integration of the software stack for three hierarchical cores
  6. System and platform level power Management
  7. Suspend and Active power optimizations
  8. Complete Test infrastructure & QA of the product
  9. Application Development and Field support

Android based portable point-of-care medical diagnostic platform

Case-study

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SoCtronics involved in building portable, AI driven point-of-care diagnostic health ecosystem. We developed Android based portable POC diagnostic platform and applications to enable front-line health workers to perform expert-level diagnostics and case management. SoCtronics has developed custom mobile platform with focus on camera and power management for better diagnostics and long operating cycle.

Work involved:

  1. Understood customer requirements, Identified components and made board design.
  2. Ported Android operating system and stabilized the platform.
  3. Implemented device drivers such as Camera, GPS, Display, Touch panel, Accelerometer, temperature & Humidity, Light Sensor, Fuel Gauge and PMIC Drivers.
  4. Developed Android RIL module and brought-up Telit 3G modem.
  5. Brought-up Redpine and TI WiFi Modules on the platform.
  6. Developed Firmware for SAMD21 (Always ON) micro-controller and bridge driver.
  7. Implemented OTA Software Update feature for updating Android Image.
  8. Implemented Firmware Upgrade feature for SAMD21 micro-controller.
  9. Implemented platform power management and could achieve target power numbers in the active, Idle and suspend use cases.
  10. Developed customized Android launcher, Clinic, Messages, Archive and Service applications.

Automotive Domain Control Unit DCU / DCU companion SoC

Case-study

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Now-a-days vehicles tend to use more electronics. ECU (electronic control unit) is making its way into all parts of the car from the anti-lock braking system, electronically controlled automatic transmission, active suspension system, network, entertainment, control systems and etc. One-to-one correspondence between the growing number of sensors and electronic control units (ECU) leads to under-performing vehicles and adds circuit complexity, more powerful centralized architectures like domain control unit (DCU) come as an alternative to the distributed ones. DCU is a solution to information security and ECU development bottlenecks.

Our solution

  • Creates deterministic high band-width, low latency NW interface suited for Camera & Radar streaming in automobiles.
  • Provides packet routing across interfaces (Ethernet, CAN-FD, neoFabric).
  • Is based on Cortex-R52 micro-controller with DP, PCIe, ETH, CAN-FD controllers.

Work involved:

  • 1. Made complete BSP development.
    • Start-up code for processor initialisation : Exception handler, MPU, Interrupt controller programming
    • Necessary peripheral initialisation.
    • Linker script customisation to the memory map of the platform.
    • Device Drivers for each peripheral in the platform : DP, CAN, Ethernet.
    • Build system to generate elf and bins
    • FreeRTOS porting
  • 2. Architecture, Design & Implementation of SW components (Interface Components, Router).
  • 3. Complete SDK for DCU application development.
  • 4. Made custom NeoFabric DP controller

Platform and System software for Android based augmented reality SoC

Case-study

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Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information. It is achieved through the use of digital visual elements, sound, or other sensory stimuli delivered via technology. Augmented reality continues to develop and become more pervasive among a wide range of applications.  The scope of this project is to develop an x86 based platform supporting Android OS to enable rich AR/VR applications. These applications require sophisticated multimedia and graphics capabilities and need to support multiple camera streams. This requires high degree of customisations to android HAL layers and significant integration efforts to enable various GPU and multimedia capabilities.

Work involved:

  1. Brought-up Android on new platform and upgraded to latest versions of Android to keep the device up to date and to ensure device remains secure
  2. Brought-up Linux kernels on platform and upgraded to newer LTS kernels
  3. Added support for all Android features like AVB, A/B update, OTA and etc.
  4. Brought-up Video/Image HW decoders and encoders. Developed required OpenMAX components and drivers to enable these HW accelerators.
  5. Brought-up multi-display support with HW composer enabled
  6. Brought-up GPU with latest mesa, LLVM and libdrm versions
  7. Exposed OpenGL API’s to native applications
  8. Brought-up multiple cameras and built a new camera HAL based on HAL version 3.5
  9. Support for code coverage using GCOV
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