Abstract:
Today’s products represent a new generation of capabilities that fuse together sensors,
actuators and electronics. In fact, recent studies show that 2/3rds of manufacturers include
embedded systems in their products. Such systems often use a microcontroller to perform all tasks
related to the application. However, it would be really hard to solve a computation-intensive application
with a low-end or even mid-level microcontroller. Another problem is the lack of free pins.
We can take a larger, faster microcontroller, if it tackles our problem. An alternative solution is to
use an external CPLD as a bridge to perform all tasks related to the I/O space, thereby freeing up
our low-cost microcontroller to perform other operations. There are a lot of embedded structures.
Each different approach has its own advantage and disadvantage. This paper is focused on the differences
of a few alternatives, which are discussed.