The high-performance requirements and stringent design constraints imposed on modern embedded systems are making the designer's job increasingly difficult. With growing complexity of such systems, standard development models have difficulties keeping up with specific constraints, i.e. they become too costly and time consuming, or produced systems are unreliable and unpredictable. In order to find more efficient development process, component based software engineering concepts for embedded systems are also explored within this project.

Component based software engineering is a software engineering approach where systems are built from preexisting components, already developed and prepared for integration. Key advantage of such approach is that components are developed separately from systems and therefore are reusable. To ensure component interoperability, component specifications conform to a particular component model. Component model defines the rules for component specification and communication between components.
    
SaveComp Component Model (SaveCCM) is component model intended for embedded systems, particularly for embedded control applications in vehicular systems. It is developed within the Save project at Mälardalen Research and Technology Center, MdH, Sweeden. Component based modeling approach is also in the research scope of the Distributed Component-based Embedded Software Systems (DICES) project under the Research Cooperability Programme of the Unity through Knowledge Fund – UKF. In order to investigate the properties of the component based approach in embedded system design more closely, we cooperated with the researchers on the DICES project. Furthermore, possibilities of implementation of the SaveCCM model in Embedded Systems Environment (ESE) are explored.

APPOES researches have organized a one-week course Accelerated Embedded System Design using FPGAs (course designed by prof. Vlado Sruk) for the international student organization Electrical Engineering STudents' European assoCiation (EESTEC), 26.-30. May 2008. The topics of the course included FPGA architecture, digital design with VHDL and HW/SW Co-Design using NISC technology with lab work and practical examples. The course presentation about the NISC technology is available in the Publications repository.