Concept of embedded systems

The hardware of an embedded system consists of processors, memory, devices, input / output devices and the basic hardware units such as power supply, clock circuits and reset circuits. The input/output devices consists of ports to access peripheral and other on-chip of off-chip units such as UART, modem, transceiver, timer-counter, keypad, keyboard, LED display unit, LCD unit, DAC, ADC and pulse dialer. Processor caches, pipelines, superscalar and other advanced processing units are instrumental in the high computing performance of a processor and power dissipation during high-speed computations is managed by appropriate processor instructions. The methods of selection of appropriate processors and memory devices decide the optimum system performances.