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

Real-time application platforms


One of the most desired characteristics of embedded operating systems, especially in life-critical and high-reliability systems, is the presence of a hard real-time scheduler. As mentioned in Chapter 10Parallel Tasks and Scheduling, a real-time scheduler provides deterministic and short reaction times for real-time tasks, given that the load of the system does not exceed the resources available. For this reason, system developers often have based their design on real-time schedulers with static priorities.

A solid and well-designed scheduler implementation is the most fundamental part of preemptive real-time systems, and it is the base for building all the other features.

Embedded operating systems designed to run a fixed set of tasks with static priorities do not implement standard interfaces for the applications, and tend to be small in code size and memory usage, by keeping a small code base with a restricted set of functionalities. Libraries for hardware...