Many of the customers are companies who do not have much experience in software development (yet). As a consequence, the GTV software and accompanying tools should be simple and clear. There is a help-desk that customers can call or e-mail in case of problems, and that responds within a very short time (24 hours).

Architecture

The GTV software is split into two main parts: (1) drivers & platform, and (2) functions & applications. (1) is delivered as a configurable black box (a product family that can be instantiated), while (2) is delivered as sample code (to be copied and edited by the customer). This roughly matches the hardware, as (1) corresponds with the IC that is instantiated for the customer (but remains a black box), while (2) corresponds with a reference board (that can be modified and/or extended by the customer). For (1) there is professional support, while the code in (2) only serves as example.

In general, drivers are relatively simple, just exposing the hardware capabilities to the software. The platform combines the drivers and takes care of composite functionality, such as control of bass and treble, and mute and demute. The function layer implements more advanced functionality such as carousels and equalizers. Finally, the application layer implements the user interface.

Although the drivers and platform are a black box (and delivered in object code only), it is still possible for the customer to add drivers to the platform if extra hardware is added to the total solution.

The function and application layers are kept simple on purpose. For customers who want to implement more advanced functionality, there is an Add-on Feature Kit that contains examples on how to implement some more complicated features.

Tooling

The GTV driver and platform software contains hundreds of configuration switches, with thousands of possible values. Configuration switches are defined in ordinary C header files, but C-style comments are added in a special format that allows to describe the type of variation point, possible values, constraints on values, et cetera. These attributes are read by a tool called LibCoMa (Library Configuration Manager) that allows to set these values interactively.

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