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STUDY GUIDE · GKU 4

Embedded systems study guide (Computer Engineering)

An embedded system is a computer hidden inside a product: a thermostat, a motor drive, a pacemaker, a car's brake controller. It does one job, often on a battery, often with a deadline, and usually for a few dollars of silicon. The first part of this unit is the machine itself: why a microcontroller is not a small PC, how its registers and memory map work, which processor family suits which job, and how a program is structured around timers and interrupts. The second part is how that machine meets the world: general-purpose pins and their drive modes, serial buses with their timing and buffers, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion, and the sensors and actuators at the ends of the chain.

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Structured by the official ETEC subject standard for this topic: every listed topic and learning outcome, with formulas, figures and worked examples. The full sections are available to members in the app.

SKU 4.1 · Characteristics of embedded systems

  1. Microcontrollers against general-purpose CPUs: cost, power and selection

    What puts a microcontroller on one chip with its memory and peripherals, how it differs from a desktop or server CPU, and how duty cycling, supply voltage and clock frequency decide battery life when you choose one.

  2. Registers, the memory map and bit manipulation in C

    The register structure of a microcontroller core, the single address space in which flash, SRAM and peripheral registers all live, and the C idioms that set, clear, test and write fields of one register without disturbing the other bits.

  3. Processor architectures for embedded systems: MCU, DSP, GPU, SoC and FPGA

    How a microcontroller core, a digital signal processor, a GPU, a heterogeneous system-on-chip and an FPGA differ in the way they spend silicon, and how a cycle budget per sample decides which of them can carry a given workload.

  4. Structuring embedded programs: functions, the superloop, timers and interrupts

    How a bare-metal program is layered into drivers, tasks and a main loop of small functions, how a hardware timer produces an exact tick from the clock through a prescaler and a reload value, and how interrupts take time-critical work out of the loop at a cost you can compute.

SKU 4.2 · Digital and analog interfacing and communication

  1. Parallel input and output: GPIO configurations

    What a GPIO pin is electrically in each of its modes (input, push-pull output, weak pull-up or pull-down, open-drain, high impedance), how to size an LED resistor and a pull-up, and how to pick the mode for buttons, LEDs, shared lines and loads too big for a pin.

  2. Asynchronous and synchronous serial communication: UART, SPI, I²C and FIFOs

    The UART frame, its signalling levels and the baud-rate divisor with its error budget; the clocked buses SPI and I²C and what each costs in time and wires; and the hardware and software FIFOs that keep bytes from being lost while the CPU is busy. The register-level view; the general I/O and interrupt picture is in the architecture guide (interrupts, I/O transfer and serial communication).

  3. Data acquisition: ADC and DAC resolution, reference, timing and encoding

    How an embedded ADC turns a voltage into a code and a DAC turns a code back into a voltage: step size from the reference voltage and the bit count, the successive-approximation conversion and its time, the sampling rate it allows, and the binary encodings for unipolar and bipolar ranges. Quantisation noise and aliasing as signal-processing results are in the signals guide.

  4. Sensors and actuators: reading, scaling and driving with PWM

    How a program turns a sensor's raw ADC code into a physical value (a thermistor in a divider as the worked case), and how it drives an actuator: pulse-width modulation from a timer, the average it delivers, servo pulses, and the power stage and control logic between the pin and the load.

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