**6. Conclusions**

12 Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH

Regarding the software development, there is no open source applications available for the IEC standard protocols, so both the data-link layer and the application layer have to be implemented from scratch. Anyway, as we're using Linux on our platform we already have a TCP/IP stack and standard development tools and libraries, so the data transport and other

The software project was divided into a few different modules, but the most interesting one is the Remote Module, (RTU module). Modules have been developed in C++ language, under a typical software development IDE on a hardware platform x86 (PC) running Linux operating system. Only standard libraries have been used in the development. After the initial setup and debugging the software toolkit also has been compiled for LEON (SPARC) architecture. As LEON has a standard Linux Debian distribution with standard C++ libraries, getting a binary file running is as simple as compiling the same source code developed in the PC in the embedded Linux by using the standard C compilers for the architecture. A GCC compiler has

In order to test the full system, two parameters were analyzed, initialization time (IT), mean time required to complete the initialization on a RTU, and Poll Time (PT), mean time required to complete a poll over a RTU. Also two scenarios were tested. In one the CC and RTU were PCs and in the other the RTU was LEON. Full details on the application solution implemented

been used to compile and link the RTU source code inside LEON.

and main results were presented in (Medina, 2009).

Fig. 4. Hardware Platform Prototype

concrete IEC specifications were built.

The breakthrough in the capabilities and performance of FPGAs has made becoming an alternative to the MCU in the design and implementation of embedded systems. The main differences between the two alternatives are in fact that the design with FPGAs need to design not only the SoC software but also hardware. This can be very advantageous in many cases because the hardware can be adapted to the specific needs of an embedded system. However, there are still significant differences in the software design methodology due to the development tools available to the MCU are far more advanced than the software development environment for microprocessors that are implemented in FPGAs.

In this chapter we present a platform hw / sw implementable on FPGA which greatly facilitates the process of software development. This platform has several significant advantages such as it is based on open components (LEON3 microprocessor and operating system Linux, Debian), tools that facilitate the development of hardware platform, etc.. But, fundamentally, the main advantage is based on having implemented the Linux operating system with the Debian distribution. This distribution is prepared to run on a standard PC. This means that all the software available for Debian is easily installed. It also has a large set of libraries for developing software applications that can be implemented and used in the embedded system that is based on this platform.

To demonstrate the efficiency of embedded systems development based on this platform we have designed a terminal of geolocation. Thus, it has completed the design of both hardware platform and software applications running on the terminal unit. Software development has demonstrated the advantage and versatility that means having both a large set of available libraries and development environments equivalent to those of a standard PC.
