The last few years have seen a significant increase in the number of embedded products containing an integrated graphical display. While this is providing consumers with a more visually appealing presentation of information, it’s introducing challenges for the embedded development team.

As well as the system level specifications, product requirements now must also include details about the visual presentation of the product. Often, the graphic design team is detached from the standard software development team, which leads to an “over the fence” style of development. Graphic artifacts such as images and screen designs are handed off to software developers who try to interpret them and attempt to make them fit into the rest of the system design. The two teams are often quite disconnected leading to inevitable integration problems.

This white paper examines some of the technical issues that graphic designers and system engineers need to be aware of when designing a graphical product for the embedded market and looks at tools to facilitate the graphic design process for embedded systems by assisting with integration and highlighting technical issues early in the development cycle.