Designing Embedded Hardware

Preface

[Enlightenment] resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer . . . as at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.

—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This is a book about designing computer hardware and specifically about designing small machines for embedded applications. It is intentionally hardware specific. There are plenty of books out there on writing code for embedded systems (such as Michael Barr’s excellent Programming Embedded Systems in C and C++, another O’Reilly & Associates title). What has been missing is a book that covers the nuts and bolts of developing embedded hardware. Sure, there are many books out there on microprocessors, but none that brings together all you need to create an embedded computer and make it go.

This is a book I have wanted to write for some time. It had its origins back in 1993, when I was lecturing at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. I was given the task (at the last possible moment) of teaching a course in microprocessors to second-year students. The assigned text for the course was far from ideal. It talked about computer hardware but didn’t show how to design computer hardware. It took a Field of Dreams approach—build it and it will go, with no consideration of timing, voltages, current draw, or anything else of importance. It was a newly published book, yet it covered components that had not been available for years. The memory chips it discussed were 128 bytes in capacity. ...