Stopped by a Datasheet (a Freescale microcontroller)! I just can't believe that M68HC08 family of 8-bit microcontroller did this to me!
A few weeks ago, I was asked to modify a project developed previously by another designer.
This device, among other things was battery operated, had a matrix keyboard, and was managed by a Freescale (read and download the Datasheet).

The most popular programming languages for embedded systems are assembly language, C and C++. This article is a presentation for EE Software Development book - a project collection about how to program hardware in high level languages and alternative approaches. Better call it Rapid Hardware Programming with High Level Languages. This book is trying to help the programmers who have only programming experience in PCs, rather than the embedded systems. These programmers are software experts on the PC platform, but they do not know how to light a LED at all, because they have not sufficient background in electronics engineering.

The UNI/O microcontroller technology has been recently released by Microchip. It consists of a proprietary single I/O bus protocol, where the bus combines the clock and data lines into a single bit stream using the Manchester Encoding technique. Since Microchip already is one of the leading microcontroller and memory devices it is likely that the near future will see an increased use of this pin saving technology.

Controlling an inverted pendulum using a Microchip microcontroller was possible at a University in Switzerland. The FLEX Base Board (hosting a Microchip dsPIC - see the Datasheet) and the FLEX Multibus Board with a CAN module were used for swinging-up and maintaining the inverted equilibrium. The Source code was entirely generated using Scilab/Scicos , an automatic code generator for control systems.

A ball control on a touch screen (using a Microchip microcontroller) was realized in a laboratory in Italy. A steel ball was kept at the center of a metallic plate using FLEX board at the Retis lab of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. You just need a steel ball, a FLEX board (an embedded board which can be used by all the developers who want to fully exploit the potential of the latest Microchip micro-controllers: the dsPIC DSC family - see the Datasheet), two servomotors and a touch screen.

Many RF technologies are competing on 2.4GHz. The WLAN and Bluetooth have dominated the consumer wireless market. Zigbee is getting hotter in mesh network application as well. More and more chip vendors have released chipsets for Zigbee. Because it is a a wireless mesh network, the initial investment is much higher than a single node smart controller. A serious development on a Zigbee project will involves ICs, the Zigbee stack, the application software in the network nodes and the network administration software. TI/Chipcon, Freescale, Microchip, Atmel, Slilabs and Amber are active in Zigbee market.

Overview
I do not want to make a course about VHDL as a programming language for HW (there are a lot of books better than my words 1), because courses and specifics of languages are public and everyone can find them easily on the Net. I just want to give some suggestions / recommendations by whom, starting many years ago, has had to develop an endless series of projects at different levels of complexity .

The Scripting languages are deployed in many operation systems, either in UNIX/Linux or Windows. These languages are developed for general purpose process automation and web programming. But you can consider using them for the software development process in many ways. Among these languages, awk and Perl are suitable for automate and speed up software development for embedded systems. Because many embedded systems only have cross tool chain, without powerful IDE supports for process automation. Here I will show you why we need them and how these tools help us.

When I first visited one of our famous TV manufacturers in China, I had no idea about the software capability of their software team. When I demonstrated my company's TV software for their evaluation, the software leader was surprised to see the modular software programming in many individual files. The software manager even commented, "Your software structure is very stupid, why do you put all of these functions into smaller files, instead of one single file? It is very head to find the variables in different files and requires longer compiling time."

Today, the boundaries between the general purpose PCs, the servers and the embedded systems are more blurred. These computers are sharing same platforms, same peripherals. For example, an x86/Mac PC can be used as a server, an x86/PowerPC CPU can be used in an embedded system like portable navigation device (PND).