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 ARM  microprocessors RISC - PowerPC INTEL - 808x  Single board computers PC104 Mini ITX, Pico ITX

Classifications Small Scale  use a single 8 or 16 bit microcontroller, no OS, development usually done in C Medium Scale  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