Prepared by EBIN P.M C.Eng. (I), M.

Tech
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

MODULE-1
FUNDAMENTALS OF EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
SYSTEM

 A system is an arrangement in which all its unit assemble work together according to a
set of rules.
 It can also be defined as a way of working, organizing or doing one or many tasks
according to a fixed plan. For example, a watch is a time displaying system. Its
components follow a set of rules to show time. If one of its parts fails, the watch will stop
working. So we can say, in a system, all its subcomponents depend on each other.

EMBEDDED SYSTEM

 Embedded means something that is attached to another thing.

 An embedded system can be thought of as a computer hardware system having software
embedded in it.
 An embedded system can be an independent system or it can be a part of a large system.
An embedded system is a microcontroller or microprocessor based system which is

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designed to perform a specific task.
 For example, a fire alarm is an embedded system; it will sense only smoke.
 An embedded system has three components − It has hardware. It has application
software. It has Real Time Operating system that supervises the application software and
provide mechanism to let the processor run a process as per scheduling by following a
plan to control the latencies.
 RTOS defines the way the system works. It sets the rules during the execution of
application program.
 A small scale embedded system may not have RTOS.
 So we can define an embedded system as a Microcontroller based, software driven, and
reliable, real-time control system.
 An embedded system is designed to do a specific job only. Example: a washing machine
can only wash clothes, an air conditioner can control the temperature in the room in
which it is placed.
 The hardware & mechanical components will consist all the physically visible things that
are used for input, output, etc.
 An embedded system will always have a chip (either microprocessor or microcontroller)
that has the code or software which drives the system.
An embedded system is a combination of 3 things:
 Hardware
 Software
 Mechanical Components

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ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

And it is supposed to do one specific task only. Diagrammatically an embedded system can be
represented as follows:

EMBEDDED SYSTEM & GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER

 The Embedded System and the General purpose computer are at two extremes.
 The embedded system is designed to perform a specific task
 The general purpose computer is meant for general use. It can be used for playing games,
watching movies, creating software, work on documents or spreadsheets etc.

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Following are certain specific points of difference between embedded systems and general
purpose computers:

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ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

Embedded computing systems have to provide sophisticated functionality:

■ Complex algorithms: The operations performed by the microprocessor may be very

sophisticated. For example, the microprocessor that controls an automobile engine must perform
complicated filtering functions to optimize the performance of the car while minimizing
pollution and fuel utilization.

■ User interface: Microprocessors are frequently used to control complex user interfaces that
may include multiple menus and many options. The moving maps in Global Positioning System
(GPS) navigation are good examples of sophisticated user interfaces.

To make things more difficult, embedded computing operations must often be performed
to meet deadlines:

■ Real time: Many embedded computing systems have to perform in real time—if the data is not
ready by a certain deadline, the system breaks. In some cases, failure to meet a deadline is unsafe
and can even endanger lives. In other cases, missing a deadline does not create safety problems
but does create unhappy customers—missed deadlines in printers ,for example, can result in
scrambled pages.

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■ Multirate: Not only must operations be completed by deadlines, but many embedded
computing systems have several real-time activities going on at the same time. They may
simultaneously control some operations that run at slow rates and others that run at high rates.
Multimedia applications are prime examples of multirate behavior. The audio and video
portions of a multimedia stream run at very different rates, but they must remain closely
synchronized. Failure to meet a deadline on either the audio or video portions spoils the
perception of the entire presentation.

Costs of various sorts are also very important:

■ Manufacturing cost: The total cost of building the system is very important in many cases.
Manufacturing cost is determined by many factors, including the type of microprocessor used,
the amount of memory required, and the types of I/O devices.

■ Power and energy: Power consumption directly affects the cost of the hardware, since a larger
power supply may be necessary. Energy consumption affects battery life, which is important in
many applications, as well as heat consumption, which can be important even in desktop
applications.

CHARACTERISTICS OF AN EMBEDDED SYSTEM

 Single-functioned − an embedded system usually performs a specialized operation and

does the same repeatedly. For example: A pager always functions as a pager.

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KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

 Tightly constrained − All computing systems have constraints on design metrics, but
those on an embedded system can be especially tight. Design metrics is a measure of an
implementation's features such as its cost, size, power, and performance. It must be of a
size to fit on a single chip, must perform fast enough to process data in real time and
consume minimum power to extend battery life.
 Reactive and Real time − Many embedded systems must continually react to changes in
the system's environment and must compute certain results in real time without any
delay. Consider an example of a car cruise controller; it continually monitors and reacts
to speed and brake sensors. It must compute acceleration or de-accelerations repeatedly
within a limited time; a delayed computation can result in failure to control of the car.

 Microprocessors based − It must be microprocessor or microcontroller based.

 Memory − It must have a memory, as its software usually embeds in ROM. It does not
need any secondary memories in the computer.

 Connected − It must have connected peripherals to connect input and output devices.

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 HW-SW systems − Software is used for more features and flexibility. Hardware is used
for performance and security.

APPLICATION OF EMBEDDED SYSTEM

The application areas and the products in the embedded domain are countless.

1. Consumer Electronics: Camcorders, Cameras.

2. Household appliances: Washing machine, Refrigerator.

3. Automotive industry: Anti-lock breaking system (ABS), engine control.

4. Home automation & security systems: Air conditioners, sprinklers, fire alarms.

5. Telecom: Cellular phones, telephone switches.

6. Computer peripherals: Printers, scanners.

7. Computer networking systems: Network routers and switches.

8. Healthcare: EEG, ECG machines.

9. Banking & Retail: Automatic teller machines, point of sales.

10. Card Readers: Barcode, smart card readers.

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ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

CHALLENGES IN EMBEDDED COMPUTING SYSTEM DESIGN

 How much hardware do we need?

 Control over the amount of computing power we apply to our problem.
 Select the type of microprocessor ,amount of memory and the peripheral devices
 To meet both performance deadlines and manufacturing cost constraints, the choice of
hardware is important
 Too little hardware and the system fail to meet its deadlines, too much hardware and it
becomes too expensive.

 How do we meet deadlines?

 The brute force way of meeting a deadline is to speed up the hardware so that the
program runs faster, that makes the system more expensive.
 It is also entirely possible that increasing the CPU clock rate may not make enough
difference to execution time, since the program’s speed may be limited by the memory
system.

 How do we minimize power consumption?

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 In battery-powered applications, power consumption is extremely important. Even in
non-battery applications, excessive power consumption can increase heat dissipation.
 One way to make a digital system consume less power is to make it run more slowly, but
naively slowing down the system can obviously lead to missed deadlines.
 Careful design is required to slow down the noncritical parts of the machine for power
consumption while still meeting necessary performance goals.

 How do we design for upgradability?

 The hardware platform may be used over several product generations or for several
different versions of a product in the same generation, with few or no changes.
 We want to be able to add features by changing software.

 Does it really work?

 Reliability is always important when selling products
 Reliability is especially important in some applications, such as safety-critical systems.

Let’s consider some ways in which the nature of embedded computing machines makes their
design more difficult.

■ Complex testing: Exercising an embedded system is generally more difficult than typing in
some data. We may have to run a real machine in order to generate the proper data. The timing
of data is often important, meaning that we cannot separate the testing of an embedded computer
from the machine in which it is embedded.

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ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

■ Limited observability and controllability: Embedded computing systems usually do not come
with keyboards and screens. This makes it more difficult to see what is going on and to affect the
system’s operation. We may be forced to watch the values of electrical signals on the
microprocessor bus, for example, to know what is going on inside the system. Moreover, in real-
time applications we may not be able to easily stop the system to see what is going on inside.

■ Restricted development environments: The development environments for embedded systems

(the tools used to develop software and hardware) are often much more limited than those
available for PCs and workstations. We generally compile code on one type of machine, such as
a PC, and download it onto the embedded system. To debug the code, we must usually rely on
programs that run on the PC or workstation and then look inside the embedded system.

PERFORMANCE IN EMBEDDED COMPUTING

 Embedded system designers have a very clear performance goal in mind—their program
must meet its deadline. The heart of embedded computing is real-time computing

 The program receives its input data; the deadline is the time at which a computation must
be finished. If the program does not produce the required output by the deadline, then the

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program does not work, even if the output that it eventually produces is functionally
correct. This notion of deadline-driven programming is at once simple and demanding.

 We need tools to help us analyze the real-time performance of embedded systems; we

also need to adopt programming disciplines and styles that make it possible to analyze
these programs.

 In order to understand the real-time behavior of an embedded computing system, we have

to analyze the system at several different levels of abstraction. Those layers include:

 CPU: The CPU clearly influences the behavior of the program, particularly when the
CPU is a pipelined processor with a cache.
 Platform: The platform includes the bus and I/O devices. The platform components that
surround the CPU are responsible for feeding the CPU and can dramatically affect its
performance.
 Program: Programs are very large and the CPU sees only a small window of the program
at a time. We must consider the structure of the entire program to determine its overall
behavior.
 Task: We generally run several programs simultaneously on a CPU, creating a
multitasking system. The tasks interact with each other in ways that have profound
implications for performance.

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KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

 Multiprocessor: Many embedded systems have more than one processor—they may
include multiple programmable CPUs as well as accelerators. Once again, the interaction
between these processors adds yet more complexity to the analysis of overall system
performance.

THE EMBEDDED SYSTEM DESIGN PROCESS

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Fig: Major levels of abstraction in the design process

The above figure summarizes the major steps in the embedded system design process. In this
top–down view, we start with the system requirements.

In the next step, specification, we create a more detailed description of what we want. The
specification states only how the system behaves, not how it is built.

The details of the system’s internals begin to take shape when we develop the architecture,
which gives the system structure in terms of large components. Once we know the components
we need, we can design those components, including both software modules and any specialized
hardware we need. Based on those components, we can finally build a complete system.

We also need to consider the major goals of the design:

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KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

■ manufacturing cost

■ performance (both overall speed and deadlines)

■ power consumption.

We must also consider the tasks we need to perform at every step in the design process. At each
step in the design, we add detail:

■ We must analyze the design at each step to determine how we can meet the specifications.

■ We must then refine the design to add detail.

■ And we must verify the design to ensure that it still meets all system goals, such as cost, speed,
and so on.

Specification

 The specification is more precise—it serves as the contract between the customer and the
architects.
 The specification must be carefully written so that it accurately reflects the customer’s

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requirements and does so in a way that can be clearly followed during design.
 The specification should be understandable enough so that someone can verify that it
meets system requirements and overall expectations of the customer.
 It should also be unambiguous enough that designers know what they need to build.
 If global characteristics of the specification are wrong or incomplete, the overall system
architecture derived from the specification may be inadequate to meet the needs of
implementation.

Architecture design of embedded system

 The specification does not say how the system does things, only what the system does.
 Describing how the system implements those functions is the purpose of the architecture.
 The architecture is a plan for the overall structure of the system that will be used later to
design the components that make up the architecture.
 The creation of the architecture is the first phase of what many designers think of as
design.

To understand what an architectural description is, let’s look at sample architecture for the
moving map. The moving map is a handheld device that displays for the user a map of the terrain
around the user’s current position; the map display changes as the user and the map device
change position. The moving map obtains its position from the GPS, a satellite-based navigation
system. Following figure shows sample system architecture in the form of a block diagram that
shows major operations and data flows among them.

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KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

Fig: Block diagram for the moving map.

This block diagram is still quite abstract—we have not yet specified which operations will be
performed by software running on a CPU, what will be done by special-purpose hardware, and
so on.

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Fig: Hardware and software architectures for the moving map.

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ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

Designing Hardware and Software Components

 The architectural description tells us what components we need.

 The components will in general include both hardware—FPGAs, boards, and so on—and
software modules.
 Some of the components will be ready-made. The CPU, for example, will be a standard
component in almost all cases, as will memory chips and many other components.
 In the moving map, the GPS receiver is a good example of a specialized component that
will nonetheless be a predesigned, standard component. We can also make use of
standard software modules.

Unified Modeling Language (UML) - UML was designed to be useful at many levels of
abstraction in the design process. UML is useful because it encourages design by successive
refinement and progressively adding detail to the design, rather than rethinking the design at
each new level of abstraction. UML is an object-oriented modeling language.

Structural Description

 By structural description, we mean the basic components of the system.

 The principal component of an object-oriented design is the object. An object includes a

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set of attributes that define its internal state. When implemented in a programming
language, these attributes usually become variables or constants held in a data structure.
 In some cases, we will add the type of the attribute after A class is a form of type
definition—all objects derived from the same class have the same characteristics,
although their attributes may have different values.
 A class defines the attributes that an object may have. It also defines the operations that
determine how the object interacts with the rest of the world. In a programming language,
the operations would become pieces of code used to manipulate the object. The UML
description of the Display class is shown below

Fig: A class in UML notation.

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KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

Fig: An object in UML notation.

 The class has the name that we saw used in the d 1 object since d 1 is an instance of class
Display.
 The Display class defines the pixels attribute seen in the object; remember that when we
instantiate the class an object, that object will have its own memory so that different
objects of the same class have their own values for the attributes.
 Other classes can examine and modify class attributes; if we have to do something more

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complex than use the attribute directly, we define a behavior to perform that function.
 A class defines both the interface for a particular type of object and that object’s
implementation.
 When we use an object, we do not directly manipulate its attributes—we can only read or
modify the object’s state through the operations that define the interface to the object.

There are several types of relationships that can exist between objects and classes:

■ Association occurs between objects that communicate with each other but have no ownership
relationship between them.

■ Aggregation describes a complex object made of smaller objects.

■ Composition is a type of aggregation in which the owner does not allow access to the
component objects.

■ Generalization allows us to define one class in terms of another.

Unified Modeling Language allows us to define one class in terms of another. An example is
shown below, where we derive two particular types of displays. The first, BW_display, describes
a black- and-white display. This does not require us to add new attributes or operations, but we
can specialize both to work on one-bit pixels. The second, Color_map_display, uses a graphic
device known as a color map to allow the user to select from behaviors—for example, large

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KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

number of available colors even with a small number of bits per pixel. This class defines a
color_map attribute that determines how pixel values are mapped onto display colors.

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Fig: Derived classes as a form of generalization in UML.

 A derived class inherits all the attributes and operations from its base class.
 In this class, Display is the base class for the two derived classes. A derived class is
defined to include all the attributes of its base class.
 This relation is transitive—if Display were derived from another class, both BW_display
and Color_map_display would inherit all the attributes and operations of Display’s base
class as well.
 Unified Modeling Language considers inheritance to be one form of generalization. A
generalization relationship is shown in a UML diagram as an arrow with an open
(unfilled) arrowhead.
 UML also allows us to define multiple inheritances, in which a class is derived from
more than one base class.

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Fig: Multiple inheritances in UML.

 In the above figure we have created a Multimedia_display class by combining the

Display class with a Speaker class for sound.
 The derived class inherits all the attributes and operations of both its base classes,
Display and Speaker.

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 A link describes a relationship between objects; association is to link as class is to object.
Following figure shows examples of links and an association

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 When we consider the actual objects in the system, there is a set of messages that keeps
track of the current number of active messages (two in the above example) and points to
the active messages. In this case, the link defines the contains relation.
 The association is drawn as a line between the two labeled with the name of the
association, namely, contains.

Behavioral Description

 We have to specify the behavior of the system as well as its structure. One way to specify
the behavior of an operation is a state machine. Following figure shows UML states; the
transition between two states is shown by a skeleton arrow.

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Fig: A state and transition in UML.

 The state machines will not rely on the operation of a clock, as in hardware; rather,
changes from one state to another are triggered by the occurrence of events.
 An event is some type of action. The event may originate outside the system, such as a
user pressing a button. It may also originate inside, such as when one routine finishes its
computation and passes the result on to another routine. The three types of events defined
by UML are

 A signal is an asynchronous occurrence. It is defined in UML by an object that is labeled

as a <<signal>>. The object in the diagram serves as a declaration of the event’s
existence. Because it is an object, a signal may have parameters that are passed to the
signal’s receiver.
 A call event follows the model of a procedure call in a programming language.
 A time-out event causes the machine to leave a state after a certain amount of time. The
label tm(time-value) on the edge gives the amount of time after which the transition
occurs. A time-out is generally implemented with an external timer. This notation
simplifies the specification and allows us to defer implementation details about the time-
out mechanism.

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KOTTAYAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE (KITS)

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Fig: Signal, call, and time-out events in UML.

 It is sometimes useful to show the sequence of operations over time, particularly when
several objects are involved. In this case, we can create a sequence diagram, like the one
for a mouse click scenario shown below
 A sequence diagram is somewhat similar to a hardware timing diagram,
 The time flows vertically in a sequence diagram, whereas time typically flows
horizontally in a timing diagram.
 The sequence diagram is designed to show a particular scenario or choice of events
 In the following sequence diagram, the sequence shows what happens when a mouse
click is on the menu region. Processing includes three objects shown at the top of the
diagram. Extending below each object is its lifeline, a dashed line that shows how long
the object is alive. In this case, all the objects remain alive for the entire sequence, but in
other cases objects may be created or destroyed during processing. The boxes along the

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lifelines show the focus of control in the sequence, that is, when the object is actively
processing. In this case, the mouse object is active only long enough to create the
mouse_click event. The display object remains in play longer; it in turn uses call events to
invoke the menu object twice: once to determine which menu item was selected and
again to actually execute the menu call. The find_region( ) call is internal to the display
object, so it does not appear as an event in the diagram.

KTUStudents.in Fig: A sequence diagram in UML.

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