The Hardware

Abstract

Most of the real-time computing systems employ general-purpose hardware components such as the processor, memory, and input/output units. In this chapter, we review the hardware of a real-time system node at component level by deferring the review of the architecture and basic software structure of a distributed real-time system to the next chapter. We start with the basic interface units: sensors and actuators and review characteristics of the common types of these components. The processor is where the actual processing is performed and single cycle, multi-cycle, and pipelined datapaths are discussed next. Memory and input/output units are other main parts of a real-time system as we will see. We will use the MIPS processor [1] to describe the hardware-related concepts as this processor is widely used in embedded systems and yet simple enough to display operation.