Rick Gentile

Breaking the 80/20 Rule
October 2007

This month's column is written by Gordon Cooper, a product line manager at Analog Devices who focuses on embedded software.

We are about to break a few rules. Rules that have cost us all time and money by delaying the progress from conceptual innovation to customer sales. Not that anybody enforces this rule. Like gravity, it's just the way it is. It's a rule that's been acknowledged at least since the 80/20 rule of engineer, economist and mathematician Vilfredo Pareto was found to apply to a broad variety of situations.

80% of sales go to 20% of customers.

80% of product defects are attributable to 20% of causes.

And most appropriate to this conversation, a design project takes as long from start to 80% complete as it does to go the remaining 20%.

That last one reflects how difficult it is to know when to say "stop" while implementing a complex design. Who among us hasn't had the experience of taking an embedded project from original concept to a fairly functional demo in an encouragingly short time, only to bog down in creeping featurism, dispatching that last bug, or "just a little more" performance optimization. It's frustrating, but we've come to accept it.

But here's how we think we can help. Embedded developers have classically faced complicated make-versus-buy software decisions, with no performance guarantees from portable software components, and long and expensive development costs for roll-your-own, processor-specific code.

If you could easily download production-ready software modules developed expressly for the embedded processor in your design, and be assured of their quality and performance, would you do it? Would it shrink your development schedule and budget, and ensure a consistently high level of quality? What if the licensing were streamlined and in some cases, as simple as a click-through agreement?

Starting with a selection of embedded media modules for audio and video, Analog Devices is tilting the make-versus-buy decision of embedded software by offering not example or evaluation code, but product-ready code, optimized by the same company responsible for the processor design itself. The result is your software development starts from a platform of stable, tested, characterized hardware and software that is designed to work seamlessly with Analog Devices' development suite. The software modules are characterized and complete with a consistent API and full documentation.

Maybe we can't exactly break the 80/20 rule, but by delivering high-quality, optimized software modules, we can make product development much less painful, and take your design from conceptual innovation to customer sales far more quickly. We think this approach reduces the effort in both the front-end development and the back-end test, debug, optimize of the design process, keeping progress toward completion on a steady pace. Maybe that's a 50/50 rule, continuous linear progress to completion. But since you are also reducing total schedule, let's call it a 20/20 rule. That sounds about right.

Through the use of proven software modules that reduce complexity and time to market, you build on a stable platform and concentrate on what you do best – rapidly delivering high quality differentiated products to your customers.

Learn more about Software Modules for Blackfin and SHARC Processors.

Rick Gentile leads the Blackfin Processor Applications Group at Analog Devices. He is co-author of the book, Embedded Media Processing.