For many years, the 8-bit microcontroller has been the workhorse of embedded systems. Design teams favor the size and power benefits that a tightly coupled processor, such as the 8051 microcontroller, ...

AMD on Wednesday at the Taiwan Embedded Forum unveiled its first accelerated processor units (APUs) for the embedded systems market, which it expects to release later in the first quarter of 2011. AMD ...

Tools for debugging embedded systems range from software monitors and simulators, which are independent of the hardware under development, to custom silicon for in-circuit emulation, which replaces ...

The trend toward multi-core devices is well underway in PCs, but in embedded systems, there's more focus on augmenting single-core devices with an array of peripherals. As geometries shrink, the cost ...

As embedded systems hardware is becoming more powerful, the demand for high quality, sophisticated and compelling applications is increasing. In addition to that, due to fierce competition in the ...

In a USB function – an embedded device with a USB interface – there is a USB peripheral controller chip. As shown in Figure 2, this chip has two key functions: it interfaces to the USB system ...

Cost is king in many embedded-system designs. To reduce costs, designers will typically call upon a single microprocessor to run the whole show, figuring that fewer parts mean lower cost. But ...

When considering the impact of reading and writing of data has on an embedded system’s power utilization we cannot just think about memory access: we need to pull data into and out of the device as ...

The operating system has long played a critical role in embedded systems. A prime historical purpose of the operating system is to simplify the life of electronic product developers, freeing them to ...

All electronic systems carry the possibility of failure. An embedded system has intrinsic intelligence that facilitates the possibility of predicting failure and mitigating its effects. This two-part ...