Exam zone
Embedded Systems
Introduction CS423 Dick Steflik
Embedded Systems
Products with included processing elements
not general purpose computing platforms
Special purpose computing platforms
System On a Chip (SoC)
microcontrollers
microprocessors
ARM RISC - PowerPC INTEL - 808x
Single board computers
PC104 Mini ITX, Pico ITX
Classifications
Small Scale
Medium Scale
use a single 8 or 16 bit microcontroller, no OS, development usually done in C usually 1 or 2, 16 or 32 bit microcontrollers, DSPs or RISC processors, a RTOS, usually a suite of development tools
Large scale
many processors, complex connections and dependancies, multiple languages and OSs
Small Scale Examples
Test equipment
Digital volt-ohm meters
Inductance – Capacitance meters
Handheld games and electronic toys (robots)
Cheap cell phones
LCD panel controllers
Higher level electronic components (Blinkm)
Robots (roomba)
Medium Scale Examples
High level game platforms (Xbox, PSP, PS2)
Digital Picture Frames
Consumer grade Routers (D-Link, Linksys)
Smartphones
GPS Devices
PDAs
Cameras (still and video)
Software Development
Usually done on a host computer
windows is most common
Linux is also popular
Method
develop (compile, link and build) on host
download into target
test and debug on target or on host based simulator
Toolchains
set of development tools for the target platform
sometimes provided by OEM, sometimes from GNU
Languages
C is most common
since most systems are memory and file system constrained, C++ is too bloated
Jazelle architecture provides native Java Assembler is a common way of forcing a large program into a small space but only as a last resort
Basic – mostly on PIC microcontrollers