HARDWARE-DEPENDENT SOFTWARE Introduction and Overview

Rapidly rising system complexity has created a growing productivity gap in the design of electronic systems. One critical component is Hardware-dependent Software (HdS), the importance of which is often underestimated. In this chapter, we introduce HdS and illustrate its role in the overall system design context. We also provide a brief overview and define a basic HdS terminology and conclude with a brief outlook over the following chapters in this book.