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

General-Purpose Peripherals

Modern microcontrollers integrate several features that help in building stable and reliable embedded systems. Once the system is up and running, memory and peripherals can be accessed, and basic functionalities are in place. Only then can all the components of the system be initialized by activating the associated peripherals through the system registers, setting the correct frequencies for the clock lines, and configuring and activating interrupts. In this chapter, we will describe the interface exposed by the microcontroller to access built-in peripherals and some basic system functionalities. We will focus on the following topics:

  • The interrupt controller
  • System time
  • Generic timers
  • General-purpose input/output (GPIO)
  • The watchdog

While these peripherals are often accessible through the hardware-support libraries implemented and distributed by chip manufacturers, our approach here involves fully understanding the hardware...