Embedded System Design: A Unified Hardware/Software Approach

Authors : Frank Vahid and Tony Givargis
Draft Version : Fall 1999

Book Excerpts:

This book introduces embedded system design using a modern approach. Modern design requires a designer to have a unified view of software and hardware, seeing them not as completely different domains, but rather as two implementation options along a continuum of options varying in their design metrics (cost, performance, power, flexibility, etc.).

Three important trends have made such a unified view possible. First, integrated circuit (IC) capacities have increased to the point that both software processors and custom hardware processors now commonly coexist on a single IC. Second, quality compiler availability and average program sizes have increased to the point that C compilers (and even C++ or in some cases Java) have become commonplace in embedded systems. Third, synthesis technology has advanced to the point that synthesis tools have become commonplace in the design of digital hardware. Such tools achieve nearly the same for hardware design as compilers achieve in software design: they allow the designer to describe desired processing in a high-level programming language, and they then automatically generate an efficient (in this case custom-hardware) processor implementation. The first trend makes the past separation of software and hardware design nearly impossible. Fortunately, the second and third trends enable their unified design, by turning embedded system design, at its highest level, into the problem of selecting (for software), designing (for hardware), and integrating processors.

Embedded System Design focuses on design principles, breaking from the traditional book that focuses on the details a particular microprocessor and its assembly-language programming. While stressing a processor-independent high-level language approach to programming of embedded systems, it still covers enough assembly language programming to enable programming of device drivers. Such processor-independence is possible because of compiler availability, as well as the fact that integrated development environments (IDE's) now commonly support a variety of processor targets, making such independence even more attractive to instructors as well as designers. However, these developments don’t entirely eliminate the need for some processor-specific knowledge. Thus, a course with a hands-on lab may supplement this book with a processor-specific databook and/or a compiler manual (both are typically very low cost or even free), or one of many commonly available "extended databook" processor-specific textbooks.

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