Book Image

Embedded Systems Architecture

By : Daniele Lacamera
Book Image

Embedded Systems Architecture

By: Daniele Lacamera

Overview of this book

Embedded systems are self-contained devices with a dedicated purpose. We come across a variety of fields of applications for embedded systems in industries such as automotive, telecommunications, healthcare and consumer electronics, just to name a few. Embedded Systems Architecture begins with a bird's eye view of embedded development and how it differs from the other systems that you may be familiar with. You will first be guided to set up an optimal development environment, then move on to software tools and methodologies to improve the work flow. You will explore the boot-up mechanisms and the memory management strategies typical of a real-time embedded system. Through the analysis of the programming interface of the reference microcontroller, you'll look at the implementation of the features and the device drivers. Next, you'll learn about the techniques used to reduce power consumption. Then you will be introduced to the technologies, protocols and security aspects related to integrating the system into IoT solutions. By the end of the book, you will have explored various aspects of embedded architecture, including task synchronization in a multi-threading environment, and the safety models adopted by modern real-time operating systems.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Memory mapping


Application software usually benefits from a number of abstractions available in the environment, for the handling of memory. In modern operating systems for personal computers, each process can access its own memory space, which can also be relocated by the system, to resize or move memory blocks using a different physical location. Moreover, dynamic memory allocations are possible through virtual memory pools provided by the kernel. Embedded devices do not rely on these mechanisms, as there is no way to assign virtual addresses to physical memory locations. In all contexts and running modes, all the symbols can be accessed only by pointing at physical addresses.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, booting a bare-metal embedded application requires defining the sections at compile time within the assigned regions in the available address space using the linker script. In order to properly configure the memory sections in our embedded software, it is important to analyze...