An Embedded Processor is simply a uProcessors that has been “Embedded” into a device .It is software programmable but interacts with different pieces of hardware . Performs both control and computation. more performance than a uController but not as much performance as a general purpose processor.

Where are they used:

Cars, Phones, Media Devices, Wireless, Printers, …– everyone uses them
without thinking about it

Typically an Embedded Processor is a single-issue in-order RISC processor with a little cache.

It can then sold as a piece of silicon, custom layout, netlist, or architectural description.

They are designed to be small, low power, and most importantly correct. Often due to the real-time constraints of an application area they are designed to have a small deterministic worst case time per instruction.

The main reason for using an Embedded Processor is : Cost

Because :

Embedded processors are small – so they don’t take up much die area and thus they are cheap to fab.

Embedded processors are verified – so I won’t spend a bunch of engineering man hours traking down hardware bugs so I can tape out my chip.

Embedded processors run software – the key part of that is the SOFT so deals veru well with changing specs.

Design Criteria

The three most important design criteria are performance, power, and cost.

Performance is a function of the parallelism, instruction encoding efficiency, and cycle time (or the good old NumInstr, CPI, Freq).
Power is approximately a function of the voltage, area, and switching frequency Also a function execution time for leakage.
Cost is a function of both area (how many fit on a die) and
the complexity of use (in terms of engineering cost).

Embedded processors occupy more than 95% of the entire processor market. A large number of electronic products require high-end 32/64-bits embedded processors.

The best example for embedded processor in the world is ARM .

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