In the day-to-day life we come across a wide variety of consumer electronic products. We are habituated to use them easily and flawlessly to our advantage. Common examples are TV Remote Controllers, Mobile Phones, FAX machines, Xerox machines etc. Each of these devices does have one or more programmable devices waiting to interact with the environment as effectively as possible. These are a class of Embedded Systems and they provide service in real time. i.e. we need not have to wait too long for the action.
Let us see how an embedded system is characterized and how complex it could be? Take example of a mobile telephone we know that a mobile phone is a very complex device which houses a number of miniature gadgets functioning coherently on a single device. Moreover each of these embedded gadgets such as digital camera or an FM radio along with the telephone has a number of operating modes such as adjust the zoom of the digital camera, reduce the screen brightness, change the ring tone, relay a specific song from your favorite FM station to your friend using your mobile You may like to use it as a calculator, address book, emailing device etc. These variations in the functionality can only be achieved by a very flexible device. This flexible device sitting at the heart of the circuits is none other than a Customized Microprocessor it known as an Embedded Processor and the mobile phone housing a number of functionalities is known as an Embedded System. Since it satisfies the requirement of a number of users at the same time it is working within a time-constraint, i.e. it has to satisfy everyone with the minimum acceptable delay. We call this as to work in Real Time. This is unlike your holidaying attitude when you take the clock on your stride. Thus we can name the mobile telephone as a “Real Time Embedded System” (RTES)
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