Embedded systems design is a multifaceted discipline that cannot be fully addressed in a single book or within a single university course. Marwedel knows this, so he has organized his book in such a way that it provides the reader with an overview of the discipline, and includes numerous references to additional material about design techniques, application domains, and research trends that could not be fully covered in it. As he points out in the preface, he emphasized the interrelations between the several techniques used by embedded systems designers instead of trying to cover all of them in detail. The result is positive, as the book manages to guide the reader step-by-step across the complete embedded systems design flow, from specification to design, to validation.

The first third of the book is dedicated to a comprehensive review of the languages and models used for embedded systems specification. Compared with another recently released book on this topic [1], Marwedel’s approach is less theoretical, but manages to cover individual features of a wide variety of languages, from StateCharts to very high-speed integrated circuit (VHSIC) hardware description language (VHDL).

The second third is composed of two chapters covering the major components of embedded hardware and software platforms. The chapter on hardware components includes an overview of different processor architectures, memories, configurable logic, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, and sensor/actuators, while the one on software components covers, briefly, the basics of scheduling, embedded operating systems, and middleware.

The final third addresses the design and validation processes that transform the specification into the final implementation of the system by composing and customizing the components described in the two previous chapters. The author follows the hardware/software co-design approach, where the initial specification of the system is created using task-level primitives, which are optimized and later partitioned into hardware and software subsystems. In the validation chapter, several techniques are covered briefly, including model simulation, prototyping/emulation, and testing fabricated systems.

It is important to reemphasize that this book is not a typical textbook that can fully support a university course. While it is very comprehensive and didactic, it doesn’t offer in-depth insights into many of the topics it covers. When used in a classroom, the book should be seen as a general guide to the discipline of embedded systems design, so teachers and instructors will have to rely on additional material to provide details on the topics they want to further emphasize in their courses. The companion Web site for this book is a good source for additional material, as it contains a rich set of presentation slides covering all of the book’s topics. In many cases, the slides include additional examples and illustrations, as well as animations to help with understanding the dynamics of particular subsystems and some ideas for practical activities (a lab using Lego Mindstorm robots is particularly interesting). Since the book doesn’t include exercises, one would expect them to be available on the companion Web site. Indeed, a number of exercises are available in German, but only a few were translated into English at the time of this writing.