14 Oct
2011
14 Oct
'11
12:40 p.m.
On 10/14/2011 2:39 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
The vast majority of embedded development these days
is done in C, with
some things (notably some low-level device handling, as you know) are
done in assembler. You can't really do any serious embedded work without
doing at least SOME assembler, for the C startup code (crt0.[so]), but
the "canned" ones distributed with cross compilers are getting closer to
being able to handle all "before calling main()" needs.
C will be the king in the embedded space for a long time, I suspect.
So I have some basic familiarity with high-end router design, and it
seems that there is a trend (for some time) to move the datapath design
away from FPGAs (or ASICs) housing multiple soft-processors whose custom
software was written in assembly to using off the shelf Network
Processing Units.
Or in general, a move away from custom hardware to standard (like
Intel's NPUs) CPU-like designs running at a faster clock rate.
I don't know how widespread the trend is but it is interesting to me
nonetheless.
Keith