How did you get started in the embedded industry? I’ve had a long history working in the embedded industry since I graduated University in 1985, developing various types of software for deeply embedded systems, initially all in assembler and then progressing to C as the core language. Back in 2000, I finally decided to start my own company based on my experiences in the industry. Our initial aim at HCC was to provide flash management software for embedded systems, an area that lacked robust support and which was, and still is, changing very rapidly.
“Where high quality and high reliability is required in embedded software, we believe it can only be achieved by heavy investment in that software. That’s the focus of our current milestones.” Could you elaborate on what fail-safety is?
In the last 14 years, what are the most significant milestones you have achieved? Of course, survival is the first milestone for any company, and those that can survive the first few years of their development have achieved something significant. However in recent years we have grown quickly and we continue to expand as we develop new products and markets. Our first major achievement was to provide truly fail-safe file systems that provide reliable flash storage by design. In recent years we are proud to have developed embedded software with verifiable quality and specialized software such as our Smart-meter File System that address fundamental needs in that industry. In general embedded systems are becoming more complex, microcontrollers are more complex, and flash has become more complex. Where high quality and high reliability is required in embedded software, we believe it can only be achieved by heavy investment in that software. That’s the focus of our current milestones.
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Fail safety is a complex concept, but in its simplest form, it describes a system that has deterministic behavior even if it is reset or stopped inadvertently. For example if power is lost unexpectedly the system may still be in the process of committing a write to a disk. For a classic FAT file system to complete any operation it must write to three or more areas of the disk to complete a consistent operation. It’s physically impossible to perform these operations simultaneously, so precautions are required to make the system consistent when it recovers, regardless of which point it was stopped. But you can’t deal with fail safety quite as simply as this—it is important to take a system-wide approach to any fail safety concept. For instance, there is no point in having a fail-safe flash management system if the file system above is not equally designed to be fail-safe. A system claiming fail-safety can never achieve that without specifying