Embedded systems are deemed real-time if they will suffer a failure when a critical system event cannot be serviced in the required time, and for many embedded systems this time limit is very short.

From the humble infinite loop to the priority-based preemptive RTOS and beyond, scheduling options are everywhere to be found. This article offers a survey and comparison. Many different kinds of task ...

Testing, alone, cannot find all potential failure points for real-time embedded software, particularly in multithreading environments. In part 2 of Sean Beatty's article on errors that escape ...

The sequence of importance assigned to interrupts. If two interrupts occur simultaneously, the interrupt with the higher priority is serviced first. In some systems, a higher-priority interrupt can ...