Ten chapters, with an additional 73-page online chapter on embedded security, comprise this book. It draws on the expertise of the three authors from their time at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, and also from an additional ten contributors who author many of the chapters. This textbook is aimed at a broad range of readers, including undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professionals and researchers working in the broad area of embedded systems. It is not intended to be a textbook describing every aspect of embedded systems, but rather it is focused on building robust and secure embedded systems in environments that are harsh in some way or subject to cyberattack. For readers looking for a book to teach them how to code an embedded system, this isn’t it. Rather, the authors focus on topics and explore them in depth so that the reader develops an understanding of the underlying principles and challenges. This is done by examining specific systems in detail. These include microaerial vehicles (insect-scale aerial robots), autonomous vehicles, and spacecraft systems. The book is not aimed at novices to the field. It assumes some basic knowledge of embedded systems and reliability principles in order for the reader to extract maximum benefit from it.

The book is essentially divided into three broad areas. The first six chapters focus on concepts and challenges, chapters 7 through 9 explore specific systems and the challenges associated with each of them, and the final chapter is forward looking and covers resilience in the next generation of embedded systems.

The first part (chapters 1 through 6) begins with an introduction to the book and an overview of embedded systems. There is strong motivation for the importance of the topic as the authors point out the explosion in embedded systems ranging from connected vehicles to smart TVs, to wearable devices, to the Internet of Things. Each embedded system operates within the context of an environment and needs to behave in a reliable manner, even in the presence of failure or attack. These opening chapters help define what an embedded system is and challenges including power consumption and reliability. Chapter 2 focuses on reliable and power-aware architectures and modeling. Chapter 3 addresses real-time considerations required for rugged embedded systems. A rugged system is defined as one that must operate reliably in a harsh environment, where a harsh environment is one that is not controlled and may be subject to heat, dust, moisture, vibration, fire, power fluctuations, or limited opportunity for maintenance, just to name a few. Chapter 4 presents emerging techniques to provide reliability for embedded systems, including field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Chapter 5 addresses reliability within extreme scale computing and covers topics such as resilience in scientific applications, checkpointing (user-level and privileged-level), and fault-tolerant techniques. Finally, chapter 6 covers security in embedded systems. The chapter is broken into two parts, one published in the book and a second part available online. Within the book, chapter 6 covers topics such as threat models, access control, and security policies. The bulk of the chapter, however, is devoted to cybersecurity within embedded systems. The online portion of chapter 6 covers additional security concepts, such as security and network architecture, software vulnerability, and security as it relates to the operating system architecture.

Having covered the core elements of resilient embedded systems, the second part of the book provides specific examples, each of which is presented in depth. Chapter 7 focuses on reliable electrical systems for microaerial vehicles such as RoboBee. Chapter 8 examines automotive embedded systems, specifically autonomous vehicles and sensors. Issues related to vibration, power supply, and other challenges are addressed in this chapter. Chapter 9 addresses computing in the space domain. Challenges related to high-performance on-board processing and the harsh environment presented by space are addressed as is dealing with faulty hardware.

Finally, chapter 10 discusses resilience in next-generation embedded systems. The focus is on the cross-layer resilience challenge when designing a rugged embedded system, given a set of resilience techniques at various levels of abstraction (circuit layer, logic, architecture, software, algorithm, and so on), in such a way that the whole system meets soft error resilience targets with minimal costs (power, execution time, and so on).

This is an excellent, in-depth book on the topic. The chapters are written by experts in the field and a deep coverage of the field is provided. While the authors believe that the book is aimed at a broad set of readers, in reality it is most helpful to graduate students, researchers, academics, and practicing professionals. It covers computer science, electrical engineering, and computer architecture concepts; in my view, it is not really accessible to the vast majority of undergraduate students.