EMBEDDED SYSTEMS - EARLY HISTORY

EMBEDDED SYSTEMS - EARLY HISTORY

• Late 1940’s: MIT Whirlwind computer was designed for real-time operations.
– Originally designed to control an aircraft simulator.
• First microprocessor was Intel 4004 in early 1970’s.
• HP-35 calculator used several chips to implement a microprocessor in 1972.
• Automobiles used microprocessor - based engine controllers starting in 1970’s.
– Control fuel/air mixture, engine timing, etc.
– Multiple modes of operation: warm-up, cruise, hill climbing, etc.
– Provides lower emissions, better fuel efficiency.



EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

v MICROCONTROLLERS
· Atmel, Microchip – PIC, Maxim, Motorola


v DIGITAL SIGNAL CONTROLLERS
· Microchip – dsPIC, Texas Instruments


v DSP & RTOS
· Analog Devices, Texas Instruments


v VLSI
· Altera, Cypress, Cirrus Logic, Xilinx


MICROCONTROLLERS
• Microcontroller is a highly integrated chip that contains all the components comprising a controller.
• Typically, this includes a CPU, RAM, some form of ROM, I/O ports, and timers. A Microcontroller is designed for a very specific task – to control a particular system.
• As a result, the parts can be simplified and reduced, which cuts down on production costs


DIGITAL SIGNAL CONTROLLER
• The Digital Signal Controller (DSC) is a powerful 16-bit (data) modified Harvard RISC machine that combines the control advantages of a high performance 16-bit Microcontroller (MCU) with the high computation speed of a fully implemented digital signal processor (DSP) to produce a tightly coupled single-chip single-instruction stream solution for embedded systems design.


DSP
• Specialized digital microprocessor used to efficiently and rapidly perform calculations on digitized signals that were originally analog in form (eg voice)
• The big advantage of DSP lies in the programmability of the processor, allowing parameters to be easily changed


VLSI
• Very large-scale integration, the process of placing thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of electronic components on a single chip.
• Nearly all modern chips employ VLSI architectures, or ULSI (ultra large scale integration)



TYPES OF MICRO CONTROLLER

More than 140 Types of Micro Controllers Available
Some of the examples are

• Microchip – PIC, dsPIC, rfPIC
• Atmel – AVR, ARM, 89cxx
• Analog Devices
• Texas Instruments
• ST Microcontrollers
• Zilog, Cypress, Maxim, Dallas, Motorola, etc.,