ACM Queue - Embedded Systems

Sentient Data Access via a Diverse Society of Devices

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 16:07:34 GMT

It has been more than ten years since such “information appliances” as ATMs and grocery store UPC checkout counters were introduced. For the office environment, Mark Weiser began to articulate the notion of UbiComp (ubiquitous computing) and identified some of the salient features of the trends in 1991.1, 2 Embedded computation is also becoming widespread.

Putting It All Together

Rolf Ernst — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:31:22 GMT

With the growing complexity of embedded systems, more and more parts of a system are reused or supplied, often from external sources. These parts range from single hardware components or software processes to hardware-software (HW-SW) subsystems. They must cooperate and share resources with newly developed parts such that all of the design constraints are met. This, simply speaking, is the integration task, which ideally should be a plug-and-play procedure. This does not happen in practice, however, not only because of incompatible interfaces and communication standards but also because of specialization.

Blurring Lines Between Hardware and Software

Homayoun Shahri — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:28:35 GMT

Motivated by technology leading to the availability of many millions of gates on a chip, a new design paradigm is emerging. This new paradigm allows the integration and implementation of entire systems on one chip.

Division of Labor in Embedded Systems

Ivan Goddard — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:26:46 GMT

Increasingly, embedded applications require more processing power than can be supplied by a single processor, even a heavily pipelined one that uses a high-performance architecture such as very long instruction word (VLIW) or superscalar. Simply driving up the clock is often prohibitive in the embedded world because higher clocks require proportionally more power, a commodity often scarce in embedded systems. Multiprocessing, where the application is run on two or more processors concurrently, is the natural route to ever more processor cycles within a fixed power budget.

SoC: Software, Hardware, Nightmare, Bliss

George Neville-Neil, Telle Whitney — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:24:11 GMT

System-on-a-chip (SoC) design methodology allows a designer to create complex silicon systems from smaller working blocks, or systems. By providing a method for easily supporting proprietary functionality in a larger context that includes many existing design pieces, SoC design opens the craft of silicon design to a much broader audience.

Programming Without a Net

George Neville-Neil — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:20:36 GMT

What if your programs didn't exit when they accidentally accessed a NULL pointer? What if all their global variables were seen by all the other applications in the system? Do you check how much memory your programs use? Unlike more traditional software platforms, embedded systems provide programmers with little protection against these and many other types of problems. This is not done capriciously, just to make working with them more difficult. Traditional software platforms, those that support a process model, exact a large price in terms of total system complexity, program response time, memory requirements, and execution speed.

Interview: A Conversation with Jim Ready

Randy Harr, Jim Ready — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:17:38 GMT

Linux may well play a significant role in the future of the embedded systems market, where the majority of software is still custom built in-house and no large player has preeminence. The constraints placed on embedded systems are very different from those on the desktop. We caught up with Jim Ready of MontaVista Software to talk about what he sees in the future of Linux as the next embedded operating system.