MCU vs. MPU vs. SoC, memory architecture, core peripherals, interrupt handling and latency, real-time constraints, firmware architecture, and bootloaders — the layer where silicon becomes a running, field-updatable product.
Embedded systems are where the digital logic Module 3 covers from first principles becomes an actual product: a microcontroller reading a sensor, deciding something, and acting on it, running firmware that has to work correctly within real timing constraints, not just eventually. This module works through the practical architecture questions every embedded design faces — MCU versus MPU versus SoC, how flash and SRAM and memory-mapped peripherals actually fit together, and the core peripheral set (GPIO, ADC/DAC, timers/PWM, UART/SPI/I2C) nearly every design leans on.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a hard real-time deadline has to be validated against worst-case interrupt latency rather than typical-case latency, and when a bare-metal superloop is the right engineering choice over an RTOS rather than a limitation to grow out of. Project 4 in this program's real-hardware project set, the Embedded IoT Sensor Node, applies this module's material directly against one concrete, deployed device.