We are now surrounded by embedded systems, like cell phones, remote control, computers, watches, and what not, even the SUVs we drive are equipped with such systems. Almost everything in this world comes incorporated with embedded systems.
What is an Embedded System
An embedded system is a concept, which consists of programming logic hard coded or burned on the circuits to make them function in particular direction or performing different tasks.
The logic drives the circuit towards a particular goal. The students learning embedded systems can opt for jobs in various files like programming, chip designing and architecture, and even interfacing of different chips together. The embedded systems field has seen many improvements in the past and will continue to see in the future.
Some Interesting Figures
There is a constant increase in demand for professionals with embedded training and it is believed to touch millions by the end of 2015. The constant incorporation of embedded systems in electronic devices has created a demand among major companies to look for specialists in the domain.
The massive boom in sales of Embedded Systems have made it to three hundred billion sets of chip to be sold and the highest use was in mobile phones with up to 60% of total sales.
However, there has been a gradual change in the sales format and the desktop computers are increasing to gain more share of sales. The situation of economy has driven towards the use of DRAM and FLASH, especially among the consumers for the field of application.
The plan proposed by ITRS says that the SOC cost will reach more than one million US dollars in the next three years. The two third of the cost is coming from the study and research of embedded systems apart from the man power used. The chip is independent from the software and the software itself takes away the large ratio of over embedded systems development.
Large-scale systems are approaching petabytes, and grid computing in the buzzword today.
Latest Developments in Embedded Systems
Grid Computing: It’s a CS paradigm concerned with enabling virtual organizations.
It is mainly classified into -
- computationally-focused and
- data centric grids.
Research is going on in the areas of interoperability between mobile and heavyweight grids, basically to help two grid systems communicate efficiently.
Developments in VLSI
The processors have undergone lot of improvement changes, and they’re still undergoing radical changes resulting in ultra fast processors. As the growth is exponential, the processors which used to be of speed less than 500 MHz now tend to go beyond 10 GHz processing speed.
Gone are the days when chips used to be of palm sizes and now it is barely seen by naked eye.
The parallel and multi layered architecture has made it possible to reduce itself in size and gain performance boost than ever before. It is expected to reach speed like 20 GHz by the end of 2024, but as the technology is gaining speed very fast, we can grab such processors by hand around 2015.
The future of embedded systems, and VLSI technology is definitely very bright, and they’re definitely going to change our day-to-day life over the next 3-5 years!