Preface to the Second Edition

Embedded computing is more important today than it was in 2000, when the first edition of this book appeared. Embedded processors are in even more products, ranging from toys to airplanes. Systems-on-chips now use up to hundreds of CPUs. The cell phone is on its way to becoming the new standard computing platform. As my column in IEEE Computer in September 2006 indicated, there are at least a half-million embedded systems programmers in the world today, probably closer to 800,000.

In this edition I’ve tried to both update and to revamp. One major change is that the book now uses the TI C55x DSP. I seriously rewrote the discussion of real-time scheduling. I have tried to expand on performance analysis as a theme at as many levels of abstraction as possible. Given the importance of multiprocessors in even the most mundane embedded systems, this edition also talks more generally about hardware/software co-design and multiprocessors.

One of the changes in the field is that this material is taught at lower and lower levels of the curriculum. What used to be graduate material is now upper-division undergraduate; some of this material will percolate down to the sophomore level in the foreseeable future. I think that you can use subsets of this book to cover both more advanced and more basic courses. Some advanced students may not need the background material of the earlier chapters and you can spend more time on software performance analysis, scheduling, and multiprocessors. When teaching introductory courses, software performance analysis is an alternative path to exploring microprocessor architectures as well as software; such courses can concentrate on the first few chapters.

The new Web site for this book and my other books is http://www.waynewolf.com. On this site, you can find overheads for the material in this book, suggestions for labs, and links to more information on embedded systems.