Hardware Software

This textbook provides an introduction to embedded systems design, with emphasis on integration of custom hardware components with software. The key problem addressed in the book is the following: how can an embedded systems designer strike a balance between flexibility and efficiency?

Examines key computational abstraction levels below modern high-level languages. From Java/C to assembly programming, to basic processor and system organization. This course examines key computational abstraction levels below modern high-level languages; number representation, assembly language, introduction to C, memory management, the operating-system process model, high-level machine architecture including the memory hierarchy, and how high-level languages are implemented.

Current practice dictates the separation of the hardware and software development paths early in the design cycle. These paths remain independent with very little interaction occurring between them until system integration. In particular, hardware is often specified without fully appreciating the computational requirements of the software. Also, software development does not influence hardware development and does not track changes made during the hardware design phase. Thus, the ability to explore hardware/software tradeoffs is restricted, such as the movement of functionality from the software domain to the hardware domain (and vice-versa) or the modification of the hardware/software interface. As a result, problems that are encountered during system integration may require modification of the software and/or hardware, resulting in potentially significant cost increases and schedule overruns.

Current practice dictates the separation of the hardware and software development paths early in the design cycle. These paths remain independent with very little interaction occurring between them until system integration.

As the complexity of modern embedded systems increases, it becomes less practical to design monolithic processing platforms. As a result, reconfigurable computing is being adopted widely for more flexible design. Reconfigurable Computers offer the spatial parallelism and fine-grained customizability of application-specific circuits with the postfabrication programmability of software. To make the most of this unique combination of performance and flexibility, designers need to be aware of both hardware and software issues. FPGA users must think not only about the gates needed to perform a computation but also about the software flow that supports the design process. The goal of this book is to help designers become comfortable with these issues, and thus be able to exploit the vast opportunities possible with reconfigurable logic.

High Performance Scientific And Engineering Computing: Hardware/Software Support contains selected chapters on hardware/software support for high performance scientific and engineering computing from prestigious workshops in the fields such as PACT-SHPSEC, IPDPS-PDSECA and ICPP-HPSECA. This edited volume is basically divided into six main sections which include invited material from prominent researchers around the world. We believe all of these contributed chapters and topics not only provide novel ideas, new results and state-of-the-art techniques in this field, but also stimulate the future research activities in the area of high performance computing for science and engineering applications.

Nsasoft Hardware Software Inventory is a powerful network inventory software for home, office and enterprise networks. The software scans all computers on a network and generates complete reports about computers hardware and software. This information is added to the centralized database and then users can generate reports about each or all of the PCs on a network.