Bill of Material

The “Bill of Material” pattern abbreviated with “BOM” describes a solution for keeping track of generated software components and valid software component combinations, especially in the case of distributed embedded system development. The idea is to include automatic generated version information in the final binary which enables the unique idenitification which components had been used to generate the final binary. All version information is collapsed into one hashcode which includes – in addition to a CM reference the component version id and name, system and component patch level (if applicable), developer id and also time, date and location depending information. In order being able to report and to identify any component combination a global hashcode will be calculated out of all components which do compose the final binary. By storing the global hashcode together with sufficient access methods on the device itself provides methods for device self-validation and component identification. A software component in this context is not only software, it is anything which has a specific scope of operation and is exchangeable, like: digital reference images, icons, application code (Java, C, Assembler, etc.), bootstrap loader, programmable hardware (VHDL code), system configuration parameters, system diagnostic application, or digital filter coefficients.