An Operating System Designed for Convergent Processing

Many of today's embedded system designs make use of both microcontroller technology and digital signal processing (DSP) technology. Control applications need to efficiently process bit-level control and status information along with fast interrupt response. Mobile communications devices rely on a DSP to handle high speed voice and image processing and utilize a microprocessor to manage user-interface and other general purpose processing. Some examples of these convergent architectures include DSP56800E from Motorola, and the ARM11 cores from ARM which feature 16-bit multiplyaccumulate (MAC) instructions and a pipeline microarchitecture which performs at traditional DSP speeds. Read more about convergent architectures in this article.