As a fully preemptive kernel, SST must ensure that at all times the CPU executes the highest-priority task that's ready to run. Fortunately, only two scenarios can lead to readying a higher-priority ...

We love interrupts in our microcontroller projects. If you aren’t already convinced, go read the first installment in this series where we covered the best aspects of interrupts. But everything is not ...

Performance is a topic that never strays far from the mind of most embedded systems developers. However, relatively speaking, many of us have it easy. We develop soft real-time systems in which a few ...

What’s the biggest difference between writing code for your big computer and a microcontroller? OK, the memory and limited resources, sure. But we were thinking more about the need to directly ...

Normal execution of a given software application is contained within the bounds of one program, or instruction stream. Such execution is provable, as well as traceable. However, system designers and ...

Embedded systems are deemed real-time if they will suffer a failure when a critical system event cannot be serviced in the required time, and for many embedded systems this time limit is very short.

Interrupts are a major feature of most embedded microcontrollers and effective real time response to interrupts is vital in low power systems that often rely on a ‘run fast then stop’ approach to ...