Performance is a topic that never strays far from the mind of most embedded systems developers. However, relatively speaking, many of us have it easy. We develop soft real-time systems in which a few ...

This paper will discuss design practices and guidelines that will maximize the efficiency of interrupts and interrupt handling in an embedded system IC. These practices can result in a smaller code ...

The proper use of an embedded MCU's low-power/sleep modes is critical to a design's success. In today's world of battery-operated devices, the proper use of the low-power/sleep modes provided in most ...

Different tasks in an embedded system typically must share the same hardware and software resources or may rely on each other in order to function correctly. For these reasons, embedded OSs provide ...

Heterogeneous multiprocessor (HMP) systems, using functionally asymmetric compute elements, such as application processors and microcontrollers integrated within the same SoCs, are now used ...

Potentially substantial performance gains from the use of multithreading and multiprocessing architectures have captured the attention of designers of consumer devices and other electronic products.

Software architecture has long faced the problem of operating within system boundaries where specific requirements dominate: ...

A new breed of micropro-cessor based on very long instruction word (VLIW) technology is well suited for embedded systems. This is due to the fact that VLIW architectural simplicity is achieved at the ...

Just as you can often treat device registers as a memory-mapped struct, you can treat an interrupt vector as a memory-mapped array. In my last column, I suggested that you use casts sparingly and with ...

We've seen in the previous articles how Ada can be used to describe high-level semantics and architecture. The beauty of the language, however, is that it can be used all the way down to the lowest ...