Elemente de organizare şi funcţionare a sistemelor încorporate

Abstract

Today’s products represent a new generation of capabilities that fuse together sensors, actuators and electronics. In fact, recent studies show that 2/3rds of manufacturers include embedded systems in their products. Such systems often use a microcontroller to perform all tasks related to the application. However, it would be really hard to solve a computation-intensive application with a low-end or even mid-level microcontroller. Another problem is the lack of free pins. We can take a larger, faster microcontroller, if it tackles our problem. An alternative solution is to use an external CPLD as a bridge to perform all tasks related to the I/O space, thereby freeing up our low-cost microcontroller to perform other operations. There are a lot of embedded structures. Each different approach has its own advantage and disadvantage. This paper is focused on the differences of a few alternatives, which are discussed.