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Preface During the early years of microprocessors, there were few engineers witheducation and experience in the applications of microprocessor technology.Now that microprocessors and microcontrollers have become pervasive in somany devices, the ability to use them has become almost a requirement formany technical people. Today the microprocessor and the microcontroller have become two of themost powerful tools available to the scientist and engineer. Microcontrollershave been embedded in so many products that it is easy to overlook the factthat they greatly outnumber personal computers. Millions of PCs are shippedeach year, but billions of microcontrollers ship annually. While a great deal ofattention is given to personal computers, the vast majority of new designs arefor embedded applications. For every PC designer, there are thousands ofdesigners using microcontrollers in embedded applications. The number ofembedded designs is growing quickly. The purpose of this book is to give thereader the basic design and analysis skills to design reliable microcontroller ormicroprocessor based systems. The emphasis in this book is on the practicalaspects of interfacing the processor to memory and I/O devices, and the basicsof interfacing such a device to the outside world. A major goal of this book is to show how to make devices that are inherentlyreliable by design. While a lot of attention has been given to “quality improve-ment,” the majority of the emphasis has been placed on the processes thatoccur after the design of a product is complete. Design deficiencies are a sig-nificant problem, and can be exceedingly difficult to identify in the field.These types of quality problems can be addressed in the design phase withrelatively little effort, and with far less expense than will be incurred later inthe process. Unfortunately, there are many hardware designers and organiza-tions that, for various reasons, do not understand the significance and ex-pense of an unreliable des