There is no magic solution that will enable every sector of the economy to quickly recover. Each market segment must be viewed separately before selecting the best path to growth for the entire market.

The biggest factor restricting the embedded market's ability to show strong growth is fragmentation. The market is made up of many suppliers focusing on different aspects of the embedded development problem, but assembling the whole product to efficiently develop an embedded product is left as an exercise for the users. Yet users are voting against this approach.

The embedded products that software developers are targeting consist of multiple levels: processor architecture, available peripherals, operating system, middleware environment and user interface. Because of the fragmentation of the embedded space, a given market segment can have more than one option at each of these levels, creating a nightmare-especially for software providers looking to get their software running on the many embedded products available.

The task quickly becomes daunting-two processor architectures, three operating systems, two middleware environments, five different user interfaces (displays, skins, buttons) and three kinds of software development tools (application, middleware and device driver).

Virtual prototyping at its utmost would provide software developers with a consistent environment regardless of the underlying configuration. With a write-once, port-everywhere environment, developers could get their software to market on a variety of platforms while maintaining a consistent software development environment. This would not only provide a much needed improvement in the way embedded products are developed but also allow embedded suppliers to present their component as part of a complete solution.

Virtual prototyping is the fastest and most cost-effective solution for assembling all these pieces to deliver a powerful embedded development environment. The pieces include the hardware platform, the operating system, the middleware, software development tools, the embedded-system user interface and connectivity.

The final element for expanding the market is simple. Two choices exist-either sell product to more people or sell more products to the same people.

Our company's strategy is to expand the market by selling to more people and by enabling our partners to sell to more people, by making virtual prototypes affordable and accessible.