Let's start from the beginning

Likely your best bet today (at the introductory level) is "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill.

With respect to your graduation project, realize that embedded systems and the Internet share very little in common. To design embedded sytems you should focus on achieving some degree of expertise in electronics, assembly language programming, and the C programming language. If your primary interest is in Internet related work, familiarize yourself with all aspect of TCP/IP, SNMP, Java, HTML, etc.

If you spread yourself too thin by attempting to work in both of these two very dissimilar areas, chances are that you'll never become very good at either.

Hope this helps. Harry C.

At first, I thank you to reply my topic.

After 3 years in university I realized that Java, HTML, ... etc. are not my thing. Of course, I didn't decide diving into embedded systems in 1 day. I have been searching and reading whatever I found and I will. I love low-level. No wonder, high-level languages and others are all must learning. And I learnt a lot with them.

In courses like electronics, digital logic, computer design, assembly programming, microcomputers and operating systems, I found that there is something fascinating about low-level part of the computers, like how parts work, communicate and how they were developed. I hope I could explain my feelings on embedded systems.

I thing I have a good knowledge about C, ASM, and not much on electronics.

I am going to take "The Art of Electronics" from library tomorrow. But Is there any other must reading books for embedded systems? And Do you think that I have to learn about PCB design? Also Somebody told me that I have to learn DSP. what do you think?

Thanks again.

Tolga Utku Onbay

Embedded design does not necessarily require coding skills (it depends on whether one has software engineers for that).

That said, most embedded designers (indeed, most designers in general) do have significant programming skills, simply because it is necessary to understand how to connect everything together such that software may be effectively written for the system (assuming it has a processor, of course).

As an example, let's say I was designing a memory interface (which I have done numerous times). One must thoroughly understand the nature of the memory controller to attach memory to it. For a DDR interface that includes numerous programmable options that must be taken into account when calculating the timing budget and how (if at all) to terminate the address/data/clock/control system. The last DDR interface I designed was not a stick, but the devices soldered onto my board, running at 200MHz / 400M/s burst data rates and I ended up with less than 100psec of guaranteed margin.

When at this level, a thorough knowledge of driver characteristics (amongst a lot of other things) is a requirement.

"The art of electronics" is an excellent source book for many of the issues involved.

DSP is not necessarily a requirement: it depends on just what you are trying to achieve in embedded design. Should you need it, I would suggest looking at TI's DSP section

DSP is a subject in it's own right, of course, and there are newsgroups devoted to nothing else (comp.dsp for instance).

Apart from that, you will need the standard skills of all hardware designers, from the seemingly mundane of choosing the correct bypass capacitors to switch mode power supplies and perhaps FPGAs (comp.arch.fpga).

If the list sounds long, it's because embedded design is evolving and there's always something new to learn.

So, good luck and have fun

Cheers

PeteS