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.).

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.