1.
Embedded system
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An embedded system is a computer system with a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electrical system, often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a device often including hardware. Embedded systems control many devices in use today. Ninety-eight percent of all microprocessors are manufactured as components of embedded systems, examples of properties of typically embedded computers when compared with general-purpose counterparts are low power consumption, small size, rugged operating ranges, and low per-unit cost. This comes at the price of limited processing resources, which make them more difficult to program. For example, intelligent techniques can be designed to power consumption of embedded systems. Modern embedded systems are based on microcontrollers, but ordinary microprocessors are also common. In either case, the processor used may be ranging from general purpose to those specialised in certain class of computations. A common standard class of dedicated processors is the signal processor. Since the embedded system is dedicated to tasks, design engineers can optimize it to reduce the size and cost of the product and increase the reliability. Some embedded systems are mass-produced, benefiting from economies of scale, complexity varies from low, with a single microcontroller chip, to very high with multiple units, peripherals and networks mounted inside a large chassis or enclosure. One of the very first recognizably modern embedded systems was the Apollo Guidance Computer, an early mass-produced embedded system was the Autonetics D-17 guidance computer for the Minuteman missile, released in 1961. When the Minuteman II went into production in 1966, the D-17 was replaced with a new computer that was the first high-volume use of integrated circuits. Since these early applications in the 1960s, embedded systems have come down in price and there has been a rise in processing power. An early microprocessor for example, the Intel 4004, was designed for calculators and other systems but still required external memory. By the early 1980s, memory, input and output system components had been integrated into the chip as the processor forming a microcontroller. Microcontrollers find applications where a computer would be too costly. A comparatively low-cost microcontroller may be programmed to fulfill the role as a large number of separate components
2.
Intel 8088
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The Intel 8088 microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on July 1,1979, the 8088 had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086, the 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however. In fact, according to the Intel documentation, the 8086 and 8088 have the execution unit —only the bus interface unit is different. The original IBM PC was based on the 8088, the 8088 was designed in Israel, at Intels Haifa laboratory, as were a large number of Intels processors. The prefetch queue of the 8088 was shortened to four bytes, from the 8086s six bytes, and these modifications of the basic 8086 design were one of the first jobs assigned to Intels then new design office and laboratory in Haifa, Israel. Later followed the 80C88, a fully static CHMOS design, which could operate with clock speeds from 0 to 8 MHz, there were also several other, more or less similar, variants from other manufacturers. For instance, the NEC V20 was a pin compatible and slightly faster variant of the 8088, successive NEC8088 compatible processors would run at up to 16 MHz. In 1984, Commodore International signed a deal to manufacture the 8088 for use in a licensed Dynalogic Hyperion clone, when announced, the list price of the 8088 was US $124.80. The 8088 is architecturally similar to the 8086. The main difference is there are only 8 data lines instead of the 8086s 16 lines. All of the pins of the device perform the same function as they do with the 8086 with two exceptions. First, pin 34 is no longer BHE, instead it outputs a maximum mode status, SSO. Combined with the IO/M and DT/R signals, the bus cycles can be decoded, the second change is the pin that signals if a memory access or input/output access is being made has had it sense reversed. The pin on the 8088 is IO/M, on the 8086 part it is IO/M. The reason for the reversal is that it makes the 8088 compatible with the 8085. 33–1 million instructions per second. The speed of the unit and the bus of the 8086 CPU was well balanced, with a typical instruction mix. Cutting down the bus to 8 bits made it a bottleneck in the 8088. With the speed of instruction fetch reduced by 50% in the 8088 as compared to the 8086, when the queue is empty, instructions take as long to complete as they take to fetch
3.
X86
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X86 is a family of backward-compatible instruction set architectures based on the Intel 8086 CPU and its Intel 8088 variant. The term x86 came into being because the names of several successors to Intels 8086 processor end in 86, many additions and extensions have been added to the x86 instruction set over the years, almost consistently with full backward compatibility. The architecture has been implemented in processors from Intel, Cyrix, AMD, VIA and many companies, there are also open implementations. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when the 8088 and 80286 were still in common use, today, however, x86 usually implies a binary compatibility also with the 32-bit instruction set of the 80386. An 8086 system, including such as 8087 and 8089. There were also terms iRMX, iSBC, and iSBX – all together under the heading Microsystem 80, however, this naming scheme was quite temporary, lasting for a few years during the early 1980s. Today, x86 is ubiquitous in both stationary and portable computers, and is also used in midrange computers, workstations, servers. A large amount of software, including operating systems such as DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS, functions with x86-based hardware. There have been attempts, including by Intel itself, to end the market dominance of the inelegant x86 architecture designed directly from the first simple 8-bit microprocessors. Examples of this are the iAPX432, the Intel 960, Intel 860, however, the continuous refinement of x86 microarchitectures, circuitry and semiconductor manufacturing would make it hard to replace x86 in many segments. The table below lists processor models and model series implementing variations of the x86 instruction set, each line item is characterized by significantly improved or commercially successful processor microarchitecture designs. Such x86 implementations are seldom simple copies but often employ different internal microarchitectures as well as different solutions at the electronic, quite naturally, early compatible microprocessors were 16-bit, while 32-bit designs were developed much later. For the personal computer market, real quantities started to appear around 1990 with i386 and i486 compatible processors, other companies, which designed or manufactured x86 or x87 processors, include ITT Corporation, National Semiconductor, ULSI System Technology, and Weitek. Some early versions of these microprocessors had heat dissipation problems, AMD later managed to establish itself as a serious contender with the K6 set of processors, which gave way to the very successful Athlon and Opteron. There were also other contenders, such as Centaur Technology, Rise Technology, VIA Technologies energy efficient C3 and C7 processors, which were designed by the Centaur company, have been sold for many years. Centaurs newest design, the VIA Nano, is their first processor with superscalar and it was, perhaps interestingly, introduced at about the same time as Intels first in-order processor since the P5 Pentium, the Intel Atom. The instruction set architecture has twice been extended to a word size. In 1999-2003, AMD extended this 32-bit architecture to 64 bits and referred to it as x86-64 in early documents, Intel soon adopted AMDs architectural extensions under the name IA-32e, later using the name EM64T and finally using Intel 64
4.
PowerPC
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PowerPC is a RISC instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC was the cornerstone of AIMs PReP and Common Hardware Reference Platform initiatives in the 1990s and it has since become niche in personal computers, but remain popular as embedded and high-performance processors. Its use in game consoles and embedded applications provided an array of uses. In addition, PowerPC CPUs are still used in AmigaOne and third party AmigaOS4 personal computers, the history of RISC began with IBMs 801 research project, on which John Cocke was the lead developer, where he developed the concepts of RISC in 1975–78. 801-based microprocessors were used in a number of IBM embedded products, the RT was a rapid design implementing the RISC architecture. The result was the POWER instruction set architecture, introduced with the RISC System/6000 in early 1990, the original POWER microprocessor, one of the first superscalar RISC implementations, was a high performance, multi-chip design. IBM soon realized that a microprocessor was needed in order to scale its RS/6000 line from lower-end to high-end machines. Work on a one-chip POWER microprocessor, designated the RSC began, in early 1991, IBM realized its design could potentially become a high-volume microprocessor used across the industry. IBM approached Apple with the goal of collaborating on the development of a family of single-chip microprocessors based on the POWER architecture and this three-way collaboration became known as AIM alliance, for Apple, IBM, Motorola. In 1991, the PowerPC was just one facet of an alliance among these three companies. The PowerPC chip was one of joint ventures involving the three, in their efforts to counter the growing Microsoft-Intel dominance of personal computing. For Motorola, POWER looked like an unbelievable deal and it allowed them to sell a widely tested and powerful RISC CPU for little design cash on their own part. It also maintained ties with an important customer, Apple, and seemed to offer the possibility of adding IBM too, at this point Motorola already had its own RISC design in the form of the 88000 which was doing poorly in the market. Motorola was doing well with their 68000 family and the majority of the funding was focused on this, the 88000 effort was somewhat starved for resources. However, the 88000 was already in production, Data General was shipping 88000 machines, the 88000 had also achieved a number of embedded design wins in telecom applications. The result of various requirements was the PowerPC specification. The differences between the earlier POWER instruction set and PowerPC is outlined in Appendix E of the manual for PowerPC ISA v.2.02, when the first PowerPC products reached the market, they were met with enthusiasm. In addition to Apple, both IBM and the Motorola Computer Group offered systems built around the processors, Microsoft released Windows NT3.51 for the architecture, which was used in Motorolas PowerPC servers, and Sun Microsystems offered a version of its Solaris OS
5.
SuperH
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SuperH is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computing instruction set architecture developed by Hitachi and currently produced by Renesas. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems, as of 2015, many of the original patents for the SuperH architecture are expiring and the SH2 CPU has been reimplemented as open source hardware under the name J2. The SuperH processor core family was first developed by Hitachi in the early 1990s, Hitachi has developed a complete group of upward compatible instruction set CPU cores. The SH-1 and the SH-2 were used in the Sega Saturn and these cores have 16-bit instructions for better code density than 32-bit instructions, which was a great benefit at the time, due to the high cost of main memory. A few years later the SH-3 core was added to the SH CPU family, new features included another interrupt concept, a management unit. The SH-3 core also got a DSP extension, then called SH-3-DSP, with extended data paths for efficient DSP processing, special accumulators and a dedicated MAC-type DSP engine, this core was unifying the DSP and the RISC processor world. A derivative was also used with the original SH-2 core, between 1994 and 1996,35.1 million SuperH devices were shipped worldwide. For the Dreamcast, Hitachi developed the SH-4 architecture, superscalar instruction execution and a vector floating point unit were the highlights of this architecture. SH-4 based standard chips were introduced around 1998, the SH-3 and SH-4 architectures support both big-endian and little-endian byte ordering. Hitachi and STMicroelectronics started collaborating as early as 1997 on the design of the SH-4, in 2003, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric formed a joint-venture called Renesas Technology, with Hitachi controlling 55% of it. In 2004, Renesas Technology bought STMicroelectronicss share of ownership in the SuperH Inc. Renesas Technology later became Renesas Electronics, following their merger with NEC Electronics. The SH-5 design supported two modes of operation, sHcompact mode is equivalent to the user-mode instructions of the SH-4 instruction set. SHmedia mode is different, using 32-bit instructions with sixty-four 64-bit integer registers. In SHmedia mode the destination of a branch is loaded into a branch register separately from the branch instruction. This allows the processor to prefetch instructions for a branch without having to snoop the instruction stream, however, SH-5 differs because its backward compatibility mode is the 16-bit encoding rather than the 32-bit encoding. The evolution of the SuperH architecture still continues, the last of the SH-2 patents expired in 2014. At LinuxCon Japan 2015, j-core developers presented a cleanroom reimplemention of the SH-2 ISA with extensions, subsequently, a design walkthrough was presented at ELC2016. The open source BSD licensed VHDL code for the J2 core has been proven on Xilinx FPGAs and on ASICs manufactured on TSMCs 180 nm process, additional instructions are easy to add
6.
ARM architecture
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ARM, originally Acorn RISC Machine, later Advanced RISC Machine, is a family of reduced instruction set computing architectures for computer processors, configured for various environments. It also designs cores that implement this instruction set and licenses these designs to a number of companies that incorporate those core designs into their own products, a RISC-based computer design approach means processors require fewer transistors than typical complex instruction set computing x86 processors in most personal computers. This approach reduces costs, heat and power use and these characteristics are desirable for light, portable, battery-powered devices—including smartphones, laptops and tablet computers, and other embedded systems. For supercomputers, which large amounts of electricity, ARM could also be a power-efficient solution. ARM Holdings periodically releases updates to architectures and core designs, some older cores can also provide hardware execution of Java bytecodes. The ARMv8-A architecture, announced in October 2011, adds support for a 64-bit address space, with over 100 billion ARM processors produced as of 2017, ARM is the most widely used instruction set architecture in terms of quantity produced. Currently, the widely used Cortex cores, older classic cores, the British computer manufacturer Acorn Computers first developed the Acorn RISC Machine architecture in the 1980s to use in its personal computers. Its first ARM-based products were coprocessor modules for the BBC Micro series of computers, according to Sophie Wilson, all the tested processors at that time performed about the same, with about a 4 Mbit/second bandwidth. After testing all available processors and finding them lacking, Acorn decided it needed a new architecture, inspired by white papers on the Berkeley RISC project, Acorn considered designing its own processor. Wilson developed the set, writing a simulation of the processor in BBC BASIC that ran on a BBC Micro with a 6502 second processor. This convinced Acorn engineers they were on the right track, Wilson approached Acorns CEO, Hermann Hauser, and requested more resources. Hauser gave his approval and assembled a team to implement Wilsons model in hardware. The official Acorn RISC Machine project started in October 1983 and they chose VLSI Technology as the silicon partner, as they were a source of ROMs and custom chips for Acorn. Wilson and Furber led the design and they implemented it with a similar efficiency ethos as the 6502. A key design goal was achieving low-latency input/output handling like the 6502, the 6502s memory access architecture had let developers produce fast machines without costly direct memory access hardware. The first samples of ARM silicon worked properly when first received and tested on 26 April 1985, Wilson subsequently rewrote BBC BASIC in ARM assembly language. The in-depth knowledge gained from designing the instruction set enabled the code to be very dense, the original aim of a principally ARM-based computer was achieved in 1987 with the release of the Acorn Archimedes. In 1992, Acorn once more won the Queens Award for Technology for the ARM, the ARM2 featured a 32-bit data bus, 26-bit address space and 27 32-bit registers
7.
Canada
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Canada is a country in the northern half of North America. Canadas border with the United States is the worlds longest binational land border, the majority of the country has a cold or severely cold winter climate, but southerly areas are warm in summer. Canada is sparsely populated, the majority of its territory being dominated by forest and tundra. It is highly urbanized with 82 per cent of the 35.15 million people concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, One third of the population lives in the three largest cities, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Its capital is Ottawa, and other urban areas include Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnipeg. Various aboriginal peoples had inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years prior to European colonization. Pursuant to the British North America Act, on July 1,1867, the colonies of Canada, New Brunswick and this began an accretion of provinces and territories to the mostly self-governing Dominion to the present ten provinces and three territories forming modern Canada. With the Constitution Act 1982, Canada took over authority, removing the last remaining ties of legal dependence on the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II being the head of state. The country is officially bilingual at the federal level and it is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many other countries. Its advanced economy is the eleventh largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources, Canadas long and complex relationship with the United States has had a significant impact on its economy and culture. Canada is a country and has the tenth highest nominal per capita income globally as well as the ninth highest ranking in the Human Development Index. It ranks among the highest in international measurements of government transparency, civil liberties, quality of life, economic freedom, Canada is an influential nation in the world, primarily due to its inclusive values, years of prosperity and stability, stable economy, and efficient military. While a variety of theories have been postulated for the origins of Canada. In 1535, indigenous inhabitants of the present-day Quebec City region used the word to direct French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona, from the 16th to the early 18th century Canada referred to the part of New France that lay along the St. Lawrence River. In 1791, the area became two British colonies called Upper Canada and Lower Canada collectively named The Canadas, until their union as the British Province of Canada in 1841. Upon Confederation in 1867, Canada was adopted as the name for the new country at the London Conference. The transition away from the use of Dominion was formally reflected in 1982 with the passage of the Canada Act, later that year, the name of national holiday was changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day
8.
Mobile phone
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A mobile phone is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the systems of a mobile phone operator. Most modern mobile telephone services use a network architecture, and, therefore. Mobile phones which offer these and more general computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones, the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c.4.4 lbs. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available mobile phone. From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to seven billion, penetrating 100% of the global population. In first quarter of 2016, the top smartphone manufacturers were Samsung, Apple, a handheld mobile radio telephone service was envisioned in the early stages of radio engineering. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a pocket-size folding telephone with a thin carbon microphone. Early predecessors of cellular phones included analog radio communications from ships, the race to create truly portable telephone devices began after World War II, with developments taking place in many countries. These 0G systems were not cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c.4.4 lbs. The first commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and this was followed in 1981 by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone system in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Several other countries followed in the early to mid-1980s. These first-generation systems could support far more simultaneous calls but still used analog cellular technology, in 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone. In 1991, the digital cellular technology was launched in Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard. This sparked competition in the sector as the new operators challenged the incumbent 1G network operators, ten years later, in 2001, the third generation was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard. This was followed by 3. 5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G enhancements based on the high-speed packet access family, allowing UMTS networks to have data transfer speeds. By 2009, it had become clear that, at point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications. Consequently, the industry began looking to data-optimized fourth-generation technologies, with the promise of speed improvements up to ten-fold over existing 3G technologies
9.
Floppy disk
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Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive. Floppy disks, initially as 8-inch media and later in 5¼-inch and 3½-inch sizes, were a form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s into the mid-2000s. These formats are usually handled by older equipment and these disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation. The term floppy disk appeared in print as early as 1970, in 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the first 5¼-inch FDD. By 1978 there were more than 10 manufacturers producing such FDDs, there were competing floppy disk formats, with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM and GCR. The 5¼-inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most applications, the most common capacity of the 5¼-inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 kB and in 1984 IBM introduced the 1.2 MB dual-sided floppy disk along with its PC-AT model. IBM started using the 720 kB double-density 3½-inch microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer in 1986 and these disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988 IBM introduced a drive for 2.88 MB DSED diskettes in its top-of-the-line PS/2 models, throughout the early 1980s, limitations of the 5¼-inch format became clear. Originally designed to be practical than the 8-inch format, it was itself too large, as the quality of recording media grew. A number of solutions were developed, with drives at 2-, 2½-, 3-, 3½-, the large market share of the 5¼-inch format made it difficult for these new formats to gain significant market share. A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted. By the end of the 1980s, 5¼-inch disks had been superseded by 3½-inch disks, by the mid-1990s, 5¼-inch drives had virtually disappeared, as the 3½-inch disk became the predominant floppy disk. Floppy disks became ubiquitous during the 1980s and 1990s in their use with computers to distribute software, transfer data. Before hard disks became affordable to the population, floppy disks were often used to store a computers operating system. Most home computers from that period have a primary OS and BASIC stored as ROM, by the early 1990s, the increasing software size meant large packages like Windows or Adobe Photoshop required a dozen disks or more. In 1996, there were a five billion standard floppy disks in use. Then, distribution of packages was gradually replaced by CD-ROMs, DVDs. External USB-based floppy disk drives are available, many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives
10.
Tablet computer
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Tablets often come equipped with sensors, including digital cameras, a microphone, and an accelerometer so images on screens are always displayed upright. The touchscreen display uses the recognition of finger or stylus gestures to replace the mouse, trackpad, tablets are typically larger than smartphones or personal digital assistants with screens 7 inches or larger, measured diagonally. However much of a tablets functionality resembles that of a modern smartphone, tablets can be classified according to the presence and physical appearance of keyboards. Slates and booklets do not have a keyboard, and usually accept text. Hybrids, convertibles, and 2-in-1s do have physical keyboards, yet they also make use of virtual keyboards. Some 2-in-1s have processors and operating systems like a full laptop, most tablets can use separate keyboards connected using Bluetooth. The format was conceptualized in the century and prototyped and developed in the last two decades of that century. In April 2010, Apple released the iPad, the first mass-market tablet to achieve widespread popularity, thereafter in the 2010s, tablets rapidly rose in ubiquity and became a large product category used for both personal and workplace applications. The tablet computer and its operating system began with the development of pen computing. Throughout the 20th century devices with these characteristics have been imagined and created whether as blueprints, prototypes, a device more powerful than todays tablets appeared briefly in Jerry Pournelle and Larry Nivens The Mote in Gods Eye. Adults could also use a Dynabook, but the audience was children. In 1992, Atari showed developers the Stylus, later renamed ST-Pad, the ST-Pad was based on the TOS/GEM Atari ST Platform and prototyped early handwriting recognition. Shiraz Shivjis company Momentus demonstrated in the time a failed x86 MS-DOS based Pen Computer with its own GUI. In 1994, the European Union initiated the NewsPad project, inspired by Clarke, Acorn Computers developed and delivered an ARM-based touch screen tablet computer for this program, branding it the NewsPad, the project ended in 1997. During the November 2000 COMDEX, Microsoft used the term Tablet PC to describe a prototype handheld device they were demonstrating, all three products were based on extended versions of the MS-DOS operating system. In 1992, IBM announced and shipped to developers the 2521 ThinkPad, also based on PenPoint was AT&Ts EO Personal Communicator from 1993, which ran on AT&Ts own hardware, including their own AT&T Hobbit CPU. Apple Computer launched the Apple Newton personal digital assistant in 1993 and it utilised Apples own new Newton OS, initially running on hardware manufactured by Motorola and incorporating an ARM CPU, that Apple had specifically co-developed with Acorn Computers. The operating system and platform design were later licensed to Sharp and Digital Ocean, in 1996, Palm, Inc. released the first of the Palm OS based PalmPilot touch and stylus based PDA, the touch based devices initially incorporating a Motorola Dragonball CPU
