ABSTRACT
An embedded computing system (or more simply an embedded system) is any system which uses a programmable processor but itself is not a general purpose computer. Thus, a personal computer is not an embedded computing system (though PCs are often used as platforms for building embedded systems), but a telephone or automobile that includes a CPU is an embedded system. Embedded systems may offer some amount of user programmability — 3Com’s PalmPilot, for example, allows users to write and download programs even though it is not a general-purpose computer — but embedded systems generally run limited sets of programs. The fact that we know the software that we will run on the hardware allows us to optimize both the software and hardware in ways that are not possible in general-purpose computing systems.
