What’s the biggest difference between writing code for your big computer and a microcontroller? OK, the memory and limited resources, sure. But we were thinking more about the need to directly ...

Just as you can often treat device registers as a memory-mapped struct, you can treat an interrupt vector as a memory-mapped array. In my last column, I suggested that you use casts sparingly and with ...

Debouncing button or switch inputs on microcontrollers can be a challenging problem for those first starting to program these devices. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that real-world buttons ...

Traditionally programmers and organizations have had an irrational fear of using interrupts. One might think that statement is facetious but on more than one occasion in the last year the author has ...

A recent announcement from Micro Digital explained how the company's smx real-time operating system can do precise profiling of code operations. “… smx v4.1 solves this problem by using the clock ...

This paper will discuss design practices and guidelines that will maximize the efficiency of interrupts and interrupt handling in an embedded system IC. These practices can result in a smaller code ...

As a fully preemptive kernel, SST must ensure that at all times the CPU executes the highest-priority task that's ready to run. Fortunately, only two scenarios can lead to readying a higher-priority ...

A new breed of micropro-cessor based on very long instruction word (VLIW) technology is well suited for embedded systems. This is due to the fact that VLIW architectural simplicity is achieved at the ...

Potentially substantial performance gains from the use of multithreading and multiprocessing architectures have captured the attention of designers of consumer devices and other electronic products.