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

POSIX-compliant systems


All the embedded systems analyzed so far represent the ideal solutions for classic embedded systems designed with a single set of tasks in mind, where features such as memory protection and task separation are not interesting enough to invest system resources in. Riot OS provides a subset of POSIX API calls, mostly to access the TCP/IP features, with the purpose of smoothing the learning curve experienced by developers when taking their first steps in developing software for embedded platforms.

Due to the remarkable progress in the last decade of microcontroller-based embedded systems, we have seen that it is not impossible to develop general-purpose, universal, software development platforms, offering standard APIs to run standalone, self-contained applications. Models for this kind of approach to multithreading systems exist in other worlds, and are applied to build operating systems for types of devices other than microcontroller-based embedded systems. Despite...