MCA-124
Embedded System
Computers built into something else — the design process, memory and I/O architecture, firmware and interfacing, and real-time operating systems.
- Semester
- Semester 2
- Credits
- 4
- Scheme
- 3 lectures + 1 tutorial a week
- Contact hours
- 44 across four units
- Category
- Core Elective - I
What the paper is
Embedded Systems is the systems counterpart to Microprocessors. Where that paper studies a chip, this one studies the whole design: what makes an embedded system different from a general-purpose computer, how the design process runs, and what the constraints of being embedded — power, memory, deadlines — do to every decision after that.
The material overlaps deliberately with Operating Systems from the first semester, and the overlap is worth exploiting. Unit IV's tasks, scheduling, shared memory, message passing and synchronisation are the same ideas you already met, restated under a real-time constraint that makes the scheduling question harder rather than different.
Units I and IV carry twelve hours each and are the conceptual ends of the paper; Units II and III in the middle are the hardware detail — memory devices, watchdog timers, interrupt and DMA controllers, converters and communication interfaces.
What to concentrate on
- Be able to state clearly what distinguishes an embedded system from a general-purpose one, and what makes a system real-time rather than merely fast. Both are opening questions and both are easy marks stated precisely.
- The memory devices in Unit II — RAM, ROM, EEPROM, flash, DRAM — are asked as a comparison. Build the table once, on volatility, write cycles, cost and typical use.
- For Unit IV, concentrate on task communication and synchronisation issues; the RTOS material is examined through those problems rather than through any one operating system.
Syllabus, unit by unit
Summarised from the approved scheme. Hours are the contact hours the scheme allots, which is a fair guide to where the marks sit.
Unit I · Introduction to embedded systems
12 hours- Definition of an embedded system; embedded versus general computing systems; purpose
- The concept of real-time embedded systems
- The design process and the architecture of embedded systems
- RISC and CISC instruction set architecture
- General-purpose and domain-specific processors
Unit II · Memory system architecture
10 hours- Cache and virtual memory, memory management
- The I/O subsystem: interrupt-driven I/O, DMA, busy-wait I/O
- Co-processors and hardware accelerators, the concept of pipelining
- Memory devices: RAM, ROM, EEPROM, flash memory, DRAM
Unit III · Embedded firmware and interfacing
10 hours- Watchdog timers, interrupt controllers, DMA controllers
- A/D and D/A converters
- I/O devices and their interfacing, memory interfacing
- Embedded firmware design approaches, onboard and external communication interfaces
Unit IV · Real-time embedded systems
12 hours- Operating system basics and types of operating system
- Tasks, processes and threads; multiprocessing and multitasking; task scheduling
- Shared memory, message passing, remote procedure call and sockets
- Task synchronisation: communication and synchronisation issues
How it is examined
- Question 1 is compulsory, covers the whole syllabus, and is made of objective or short-answer questions. It carries 12 marks.
- The rest of the paper is four units matching the four above. Each unit sets two questions and you attempt one, so there are four more answers at 12 marks each.
- Examiners are asked to map every question to a course outcome using Bloom's taxonomy, which is why questions are phrased as “apply”, “analyse” or “evaluate” rather than only “explain”.
The pass mark is 40 out of 100 in every paper.
Learning objectives
- Knowledge of the basic structure and function of embedded systems
- The process of designing embedded systems
- Operating system concepts, their types, and choosing an RTOS
- Interfacing an embedded system with peripherals and memory devices
Assumed beforehand
- Microprocessor and microcontroller concepts
- Operating system concepts
Paired in the scheme with MCA-168 Lab based on Core Elective I.
Books it is taught from
- TB1Raj Kamal, “Embedded Systems”, TMH, 2nd edition, 2006
- TB2Shibu K. V., “Introduction to Embedded Systems”, McGraw Hill, 2nd edition, 2017
Notes for MCA-124
Lecture notes, question papers and assignments filed against MCA-124 are in the library. Everything there has been checked by a moderator before it appears, and an account is free — new ones are approved by hand, which is what keeps the shelf clean.