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Excerpts from the Preface:

Embedded software is ubiquitous. It forms a core component of an enormous range of systems, from aircraft, passenger cars and medical equipment, to children's toys, video recorders and microwave ovens. This book provides a complete and coherent set of software patterns to support the development of this type of application.

What are the key features of this book?

* The focus is on the rapid development of software for time-triggered, embedded systems, using software patterns. The meaning of "time-triggered" is explained in Chapter 1; software patterns are introduced in Chapter 2.

* The systems are all based on microcontrollers, from the widely-used 8051 family. This vast family of devices is manufactured by a number of companies, including Philips, Infineon, Atmel, Dallas, Texas Instruments and Intel. The range of different 8051 microcontrollers available is reviewed in Chapter 3.

* Time-triggered techniques are the usual choice in safety-related applications, where reliability is a crucial design requirement. However, the need for reliability is not restricted to systems such as drive-by-wire passenger cars, aerospace systems or monitoring systems for industrial robots: even at the lowest level, an alarm clock that fails to sound on time, or a video recorder that operates intermittently may not have safety implications but, equally, will not have high sales figures. The patterns presented here allow time-triggered techniques to be simply and cost-effectively applied in virtually any embedded project.

* The applications discussed in detail must carry out tasks or respond to events over time intervals measured in milliseconds. This level of response can be economically and reliably achieved with an 8-bit microcontroller using the approaches discussed in this book, and is appropriate for many applications, up to and including aircraft flight control systems.

* The software is implemented entirely in "C". All of the source code in the book appears on the enclosed CD.