EMBEDDED APPLICATIONS DESIGN USING REAL-TIME OS”

EMBEDDED APPLICATIONS DESIGN USING REAL-TIME OS

INTRODUCTION

You read about it everywhere: distributed computing is the next revolution, Perhaps relegating our desktop computers to the museum. But in fact the age of distributed computing has been around for quite a while. Every time we withdraw money from an ATM, start our car, use our cell phone, or microwave our dinner, microprocessors are at work performing dedicated functions. These are examples of just a very few of the thousands of “embedded systems.”

Until recently the vast majority of these embedded systems used 8- and 16-bit microprocessors, requiring little in the way of sophisticated software development tools, including an Operating System (OS). But the 32-bit processors are now driving an explosion in high-volume embedded applications. And a new trend towards integrating a full system-on-a-chip (SOC) promises a further dramatic expansion for 32-bit embedded applications as we head into the 21st century.

Aerospace companies were the first end-markets for embedded systems, driven by military and space applications. But this market has never developed the growth potential of the newer commercial applications. In the past five years, the major end-markets for embedded systems have been telecommunications, computer networking, and office equipment. But, now we see consumer and automotive electronics as major emerging markets. And looming on the horizon is the suspected wave of networked appliances, with Sun Microsystems, IBM, Microsoft and others targeting products and standards; envisioning billions of embedded network connections running embedded JAVA applications across a network.