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Embedded & Real-Time Systems
Real-Time Embedded Systems:

Real-time and embedded systems: the two definitions are not mutually inclusive, i.e. an embedded system does not imply that the system must also be real-time, nor does a real-time system inherantly mean that it is an embedded system.

Some salient points on embedded and real-time system definitions:
  • Real-time (RT) does not necessarily mean "as fast as possible". A system that is designated as being real-time indicates that a time constrained response is required from certain system operations; and failure to meet those constraints is considered a system failure (N.B. at this point we are not distinguishing between what has been termed in the industry as "hard" and "soft" real-time).

  • An embedded designation indicates that a system has a specific pre-defined purpose or function, it is not a "general purpose" tool. This term also usually implies some form of resource constraint e.g.
          • Power
          • storage and/or run-time memory
          • processing power etc.

  • Real-time: Strictly defined performance constraint parameters in terms of operational latencies, and/or throughput.

  • Applications operate within an RTOS or even "bare metal" environment instead of well known Windows, Linux, Unix operating systems.

  • Certain particular design considerations must be applied when developing RT and embedded systems architectures:
      • strictly controlled deterministic resource management
      • task priority interactions (priority inversion, dead-lock, live-lock etc.)
      • deterministic responses
      • concurrency interactions within a complex environment
      • monitoring of run-time resources
      • fault tolerant and fail-safe behaviour in mission critical systems.


AM2D Real-Time and Embedded services:

Architecture and software development for real-time and/or embedded systems requires a specialized mind-set: at AM2D we have 25+ years of real-time and embedded systems development experience in a number of areas including:

  • Industrial process control.
  • Nuclear.
  • Seismic research and data acquisition.
  • SCADA (Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition).
  • Vision based robotics.
  • Medical devices.
  • High performance mission critical systems.


AM2D offers design and development services for all areas of embedded and real-time systems:

Our previous development work includes experience with a number of RT operating systems including:
  • VxWorks
  • QNX
  • ThreadX
  • PSOS
  • Nucleus
  • Green Hills Integrity

Contact us to disscuss your embedded and real-time project


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