Embedded System Design: A Unified Hardware/Software Introduction

In today's world, embedded systems are everywhere—homes, offices, cars, factories, hospitals, planes, and consumer electronics. Their huge numbers and new complexity calls for a new design approach, one that emphasizes high-level tools and hardware/software tradeoffs, rather than low-level assembly-language programming and logic design.

This exciting new book presents the traditionally distinct fields of software and hardware design in a new unified approach. It covers trends and challenges, introduces the design and use of single-purpose processors ("hardware") and general-purpose processors ("software"), describes memories and buses, illustrates hardware/software tradeoffs using a digital camera example, and discusses advanced computation models, controls systems, chip technologies, and modern design tools.

Whether a student or working professional, readers of this outstanding new book will learn how to look at embedded systems in a whole new way, one that allows them to build modern embedded systems having both hardware and software.

"Software and hardware cannot be considered independently today. They are interwoven on all levels of design flow from requirements to product specification, to manufacturing. EMBEDDED SYSTEM DESIGN is an excellent text that offers a unified approach to software and hardware concepts and design techniques. A necessary text for the second course in software engineering, computer organization, or system design".
— Dan Gajski, Director of the Center for Embedded Computer Systems at the University of California, Irvine.