9.1 INTRODUCTION
Greg Papadopoulos is among many who believe that embedded processors are the next big thing in computer hardware. Proponents of general-purpose microprocessors may find this statement provocative—if not downright inflammatory. It is, however, easy to see how someone could come to this conclusion, given that practically every device that interacts with the physical world includes some sort of computerized control. As we conduct our daily activities, we encounter literally scores of embedded processors, whereas we might use only one or two general-purpose systems.
An exact definition of embedded systems is hard to come by. In every sense, they are real computers, having a CPU, memory, and some sort of I/O capabilities. But they ...
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