Laxity in Maintaining an Embedded Product can Affect the Market Potential of that Product

Engineered products are mechanical devices which means they can breakdown during their life cycle. This can be minimized by performing maintenance on the product. In embedded systems, maintainability is determined by the life cycle of the product and it is different for different products.

However, maintaining an embedded product is not easy. These products are complex and only specialized technicians can undertake maintenance. Many issues can also crop up during maintenance like IP (intellectual property) portability (necessitated by system migration) and component obsolescence.

Thankfully, in many critical industries such as avionics, automotive and military applications, the life cycle (introduction, growth, maturity, decline, phase-out, obsolescence) of embedded products is much longer than the obsolescence phase.

Another challenge is analyzing the run-time behavior of the embedded system. One of the most common techniques used here is tracing. During tracing, a log is used to capture data on the execution of the embedded system. Nowadays, many software are available that can trace information on a log.

Maintenance is important because if you don’t debug the system promptly, the sales of your product might begin to lag. The negative word-of-mouth publicity generated will eventually affect the sales of your product.