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ESE Magazine Jan/Feb 06
04
Embedded Software: The
Works – by Colin Walls
Martin Whitbread
Eclipse perspectives:
showing the different
views of the system
#define RAM_SIZE 0x1000
extern char RAM[RAM_SIZE];
COLIN WALLS has produced a very valuable document
in the history of embedded system literature. Not a
few books in the past have either been based on one academics
limited experience or consist of an overview of
the entire spectrum of products currently available. Neither of
these is very useful to practitioners. The author here has constructed
a document that is largely based on previously published
papers that have been updated and linked into a narrative,
with some interesting asides. The information comes
across in an extremely useful format and although very occasionally
some of the architectures mentioned might seem a little
dated the actual technologies are very relevant.
This book is not a “hard sell” for Accelerated Technology,
where Colin Walls has worked for some time, but much more
technical view of the whole field of embedded software. There is
good stuff here, for electronic systems engineers faced with further
involvement with software and for software engineers who
are unlikely to have had the depth of experience that Colin has
had. The topics covered range from an excellent introduction,
which includes memory architecture, software migration and
even USB. Design and development follows, with the increasingly
important Eclipse IDE (more on that later) and designing with
UML. This is followed by very useful sections on programming
embedded systems, using C, C++ or an RTOS. Communications
technologies are not neglected, the book finishes with
Networking, including IPv6 and SNMP, and programmable logic.
This book is accompanied by a CDROM containing text files
of code and Power Point slides, for academic use. There are
400 slides in all, quite enough for a program of teaching. As
such it is a valuable resource for the few electronic engineering/embedded
systems courses still running. As book, it is not a
necessary, cover-to-cover read, the structure is such that you
can dip in and out, by chapter or by section. The shear variety
and range of the embedded systems industry, the different com-
const char tests[] = { 0, 0xff, 0x55, 0xaa };
int ramtest()
{
register int testnum, ramloc;
register char save;
}
for (ramloc=0; ramloc