Heath Steve. Embedded Systems Design

2nd Edition. — Newnes, 2002. — 451 p. — ISBN-10: 0750655461, ISBN-13: 978-0750655460.The term embedded systems design covers a very wide range of microprocessor designs and does not simply start and end with a simple microcontroller. It can be a PC running software other than Windows and word processing software. It can be a sophisticated multiprocessor design using the fastest processors on the market today.The common thread to embedded systems design is an understanding of the interaction that the various components within the system have with each other. It is important to understand how the hardware works and the restraints that using a certain peripheral may have on the rest of the system. It is essential to know how to develop the software for such systems and the effect that different hardware designs can have on the software and vice versa. It is this system design knowledge that has been captured in this book as a series of tutorials on the various aspects
of embedded systems design.Chapter 1 defines what is meant by the term and in essence defines the scope of the rest of the book. The second chapter provides a set of tutorials on processor architectures explaining
the different philosophies that were used in their design and creation. It covers many of the common processor architectures ranging from 8 bit microcontrollers through CISC and RISC
processors and finally ending with digital signal processors and includes information on the ARM processor family.The third chapter discusses different memory types and their uses. This has been expanded in this edition to cover caches in more detail and the challenges associated with them for embedded
design. The next chapter goes through basic peripherals such as parallel and serial ports along with timers and DMA controllers. This theme is continued in the following chapter which covers analogue to digital conversion and basic power control.Interrupts are covered in great detail in the sixth chapter because they are so essential to any embedded design. The different types that are available and their associated software routines
are described with several examples of how to use them and, perhaps more importantly, how not to use them. The theme of software is continued in the next two chapters which cover real-time operating systems and software development.Again, these have a tremendous effect on embedded designs but whose design implications are often not well understood or explained. Chapter 9 discusses debugging and emulation techniques.
The remaining five chapters are dedicated to design examples covering buffer and data structures, memory and processor performance trade-offs and techniques, software design examples
including using a real-time operating system to create state machines and finally a couple of design examples. In this edition, an example real-time system design is described that uses a non-realtime system to create an embedded system. The C source code is provided so that it can be run and experimented with on a PC running MS-DOS.