Summary of lecture on

Embedded Systems Architectures

By: Shivam (T19126)
Basic architecture of an embedded system consist of 3 building blocks software, hardware and on top of these two the required application.
In Hardware, we encounter CPU unit, Memory where algorithm is generally stored, and Datapath where different hardware blocks are connected which generally
consists of ALU, registers etc.
In Software, we encounter certain device drivers, OS where we have different functions defining process management, Resource management, File transfer protocols,
Graphical user interfaces etc. and finally Application program.
Embedded system is more application specific rather than general purpose so characteristics of the system are also rely on the specific application. Like some
application require real time operations so high performance is desirable for that embedded system so the costs of that increases and vice versa.
Now to improve the performance, different techniques can be used like Pipelining where we segment a long computation path in small parts so that delay per
segment is reduced compared to full path delay and hence clock frequency can be increased and so the performance.
But there is always upper limit to clock frequency due to bandwidth limitations of hardware devices, since at high frequency problems like clock feedthrough etc.
increases.
Multiple units can be used to improve throughput but that lead to more hardware requirements and hence there is tradeoff between power requirement and
performance.
Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architectures are there where we can exploit instruction level parallelism and hence the performance can be controlled.
Real Designs uses combined approach of top-down and down-top approach, where we start from abstract level and scratch level respectively.
While designing we go for stepwise improvement in design process. We perform a step and then then analyze the state and refine that and improve it.
Design of an embedded system have different level of abstraction:
…like requirement level which is requirements of the user out of the system, which can be judged through direct consumer interaction, analyzing market
requirements, sample and review etc. These requirements can be functional where outputs are functions of input and non-functional like, performance requirements,
cost, power demand, size etc.
…like Specifications of the systems which is a more precise description of the system which may include functional or non-functional elements. E.g. a GPS system
specification includes what is received from GPS, map data, user interface, operations to be done to process the requests etc.
…like architecture design, that we defined earlier software part, hardware part and the application program.
Then Block transfer level for hardware and software for a GPS system is shown.
Careful and better designing of Hardware and software elements perquisites analysis and study of architecture of system to be build. These elements can be ready
made which are already highly optimized or can be built from scratch so preliminary abstract level analysis is a must for better design.
Then after designing these elements final step is we integrate those to build the system which requires debug skills because while integration we encounter various
bugs and problems in our system. So stepwise debugging can be implemented to debug and final system development.
Then testing of system is done to verify the final system before sending to market to verify that it is bug free.
Characteristics of these systems find a wide and essential applications in industries like Consumer Electronics, Automotive industry, Medical applications, Automation,
Industrial Automation and control etc.