Episode 65: Introduction to Embedded Systems

This episode is an introduction to embedded system. It is an
introduction in the sense that we cover many topics very briefly:
upcoming episodes will provides details for many of these topics.
We start by discussing what an embedded system is an what the
important characteristics are. Among them is limited resources,
concurrency, real time and hardware integration. We also discuss
the range of embedded systems from small mirocontrollers to mobile
phones to distributed real time embedded systems. We also cover the
different business case for embedded systems (per unit cost) and
some non-trivial developmental aspects (cross compilation
debugging, heisenbugs). We close the episode by discussing some
important architectural styles (time triggered, event-based,
microkernels, state machines) as well as tools of the trade:
languages, operating systems and middleware.