Building Embedded Systems: Programmable Hardware

© Changyi Gu 2016

Changyi Gu, Building Embedded Systems, 10.1007/978-1-4842-1919-5_1

1. The Whole Picture

Changyi Gu¹ 

(1)San Diego, California, USA

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this chapter (doi:10.​1007/​978-1-4842-1919-5_​1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

—John Gall (Ref [1])

The world of embedded systems is pretty much a farrago of everything, with each system having its own idiosyncrasies. In the old days, many systems would forgo microprocessors in favor of glue logic or application specific controllers to drive costs down. This makes it very hard to have a generalized discussion ...