In previous articles, we have looked at the multi-tasking model and we have seen that each task is a quasi-independent program. Although tasks in an embedded application have a degree of independence, ...

Different tasks in an embedded system typically must share the same hardware and software resources or may rely on each other in order to function correctly. For these reasons, embedded OSs provide ...

This two-part series addresses the use and misuse of two of the most essential synchronization primitives in modern embedded systems, the mutex (this part) and the semaphore (part 2). Mutexes and ...

The next step in the system level of the design described in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of this series is to map out the communications between the various tasks and peripherals in the system.

The past decade has seen a shift from large, pc board-based systems in which computing is done in one location to an environment of many distributed small-footprint systems and subsystems, each of ...