Microcontroller versus System-on-Chip in Embedded System Designs
Microcontrollers (μC) have been dominating embedded system designs for decades. With 8, 16, and 32 bit variants and many different on-chip peripherals and memory configurations embedded system designers have many options to choose from. Semiconductor vendors often provide development tools, software libraries and code examples for common problems free of charge and free of licensing royalties, making it easy and straight forward to get an embedded project off the ground quickly.

However within the last couple of years, Systems-on-Chip (SoC) started “infringing” on the μC turf for embedded designs. SoC commonly provide more processing power, multiple CPU cores, support for high-level operating systems, access to mass storage devices and more. Affordable embedded development boards such as Beaglebone, Beagleboard, Minnowboard, Raspberry Pi and many others are sparking embedded engineers’, hardware and software developers alike, imaginations. Why not use an SoC for our next design?

Containerization – An Alternative to Virtualization in Embedded Systems
Virtualization is the foundation of cloud computing. It enables efficient deployment of independent systems across a computing infrastructure sharing resources for better utilization and eventually cost savings. With more and more powerful system-on-chip (SoC) available to embedded developers the idea of combining multiple discrete embedded systems into one using virtual machines is the logical consequence.

While the principle idea and goals of containerization are essentially the same as for
virtualization, there are significant differences between the two technologies. In a nutshell, virtualization is abstraction of hardware while containerization is abstraction of operating systems.

Embedded Linux Systems with the Yocto Project
Developers are increasingly integrating Linux and open source into their embedded systems. It supports virtually all hardware architectures and many peripherals, scales well, offers full source code, and requires no royalties.

The Yocto Project makes it much easier to customize Linux for embedded systems. It has become the standard for developing embedded Linux systems.

Published by Pearson Education in its Prentice Hall Open Source Software Development Series, the book is available through book retailers.

Yocto Project – Big in Embedded Linux

An introduction into the Yocto Project published by the Linux Foundation.

Yocto Project for Engineering Leaders

A briefing for engineering leaders on how they can leverage the Yocto Project for embedded Linux projects developed by their engineering teams.