It really looks like these were typos and thus dependencies are missed.

[keithpenney]

To be honest, I didn't do much more than just:

grep -r --include="*akefile" --include="*.mk" --include="*.sh" --include="*.cmake" EMBEDDED_DIR
# exactly two hits; both empty dependencies with no associated targets

grep -r --include="*akefile" --include="*.mk" --include="*.sh" --include="*.cmake" EMBEDDEDSW_DIR
# 23 hits including defining the variable and an associated recipe

I won't pretend to understand the full build system, so it's entirely possible that this is actually intentional and there's some meta-scripting magic making this all work. Looks like a typo though.