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 ...

After introducing interrupts and the foreground/background architecture, I am finally ready to tackle the concept of a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). In this first lesson on RTOS (commonly ...

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 ...

Traditionally programmers and organizations have had an irrational fear of using interrupts. One might think that statement is facetious but on more than one occasion in the last year the author has ...

In the last lesson, you encountered the concept of a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS), and you worked out a manual procedure of switching the context from one thread to another. In this lesson, ...

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

With the advent of multithreaded/multicore CPUs, even embedded real-time applications are starting to run on SMP systems—for example, both the Xbox 360 and PS/3 are multithreaded, and there even have ...

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 ...