Book Image

Embedded Systems Architecture - Second Edition

By : Daniele Lacamera
5 (1)
Book Image

Embedded Systems Architecture - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Daniele Lacamera

Overview of this book

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. This book will help you get the hang of the internal working of various components in real-world systems. You’ll start by setting up a development environment and then move on to the core system architectural concepts, exploring system designs, boot-up mechanisms, and memory management. As you progress through the topics, you’ll explore the programming interface and device drivers to establish communication via TCP/IP and take measures to increase the security of IoT solutions. Finally, you’ll be introduced to multithreaded operating systems through the development of a scheduler and the use of hardware-assisted trusted execution mechanisms. With the help of this book, you will gain the confidence to work with embedded systems at an architectural level and become familiar with various aspects of embedded software development on microcontrollers—such as memory management, multithreading, and RTOS—an approach oriented to memory isolation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Introduction to Embedded Systems Development
4
Part 2 – Core System Architecture
8
Part 3 – Device Drivers and Communication Interfaces
13
Part 4 – Multithreading

The Boot-Up Procedure

Now that the mechanisms, tools, and methodologies are in place, it is finally time to start looking at the procedures required to run the software on the target. Booting up an embedded system is a process that often requires knowledge of the specific system and the mechanisms in play. Depending on the target, there are a few indications we need to look for in the manual to find out what the system expects from the developer to successfully boot executables from the flash memory. This chapter will focus on the description of the boot process, with emphasis on the case of the Cortex-M microcontroller, which we decided to use as a reference platform. In particular, we will cover the following topics:

  • The interrupt vector table
  • Memory layout
  • Building and running the boot code
  • Multiple boot stages

By the end of this chapter, you will have an overview of main-loop embedded development.