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Meeting the Need for Specialist Training The courses in this curriculum are designed to train engineers both in good analysis and design techniques, and in good C and C++ programming practices applicable to real time and embedded systems projects using microcontroller families such as PIC, 8051 and C167. You can chose courses targeted at specific processors, or take a "generic" course if you prefer. If you need to work even closer to the metal, we also offer courses in Interfacing, assembly language programming, and data acquisition and control buses. Most C and C++ training courses on the market are intended for programmers developing traditional commercial Information Systems on PCs running a Microsoft Operating System, or servers and workstations running UNIX or Linux. However, the design and programming of real-time and embedded systems require skills not normally taught by such courses: the need to meet hard real-time deadlines, the requirement to interact closely with hardware, the constraints imposed by short word lengths and very small memory footprints, and so on. Also, developers of a real time or embedded system need to be able to operate at several levels of detail at once. On the one hand they need to understand the characteristics of the devices or processes being modeled and controlled, and yet at the same time they need to be capable of developing high level abstractions and their associated data structures and algorithms that are so vital to designing large, well structured and maintainable applications. Object oriented approaches can be of help in some situations, but for many applications they do not offer much advantage over more traditional approaches such as those described by Ward and Mellor, or by Hatley Pirbhai. |
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Hands-on work in these courses is carried out using PC-based cross development tools and target hardware appropriate to the course. You download and run your programs on real microcontrollers, to interact with real hardware in real time. |
