Managing component variability with a firmware calibration model; reduced manufacturing costs and freedom in vendor selection

Embedded firmware control systems often model real world devices with data structures called components. These firmware component models provide methods to change a control set point or to monitor an analog signal value. The firmware models can be difficult to manage when the real world components vary significantly from unit to unit or from batch to batch, as is often the case for the optical devices used in telecommunication and medical appliances. This variability can result in added costs to preselect devices or a deployment limited to single vendor solutions. This paper describes a firmware component model that provides a run time configurable calibration data structure which manages the firmware complexity, hides the component to component variability from the control algorithms, and remains suitable for small memory limited embedded control processors