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

Summary

Memory management in an embedded system is the source of the most critical bugs, and for this reason, particular attention must be dedicated to designing and implementing the correct solutions for the platform in use and application purposes. The execution stack should be carefully placed, sized, and delimited when possible.

Systems not providing dynamic allocations are safer, but embedded systems with higher complexity benefit from dynamic allocation techniques. Programmers must be aware that errors in memory handling can be critical for a system and very difficult to spot, so extra care is required when code handles dynamically allocated pointers.

The MPU can be a vital tool to enforce access permissions and attributes on memory regions, and it can be used for several purposes. In the example shown, we implemented an MPU-based mechanism to enforce a physical boundary for the stack pointer.

In the next chapter, we will examine other common components included in modern...