One of the driving factors of innovation in the field of embedded systems is cost, since they will often be high-volume, cheap consumer products. To that end, it helps to have the entire microprocessor, memory, storage, and input/output peripherals on a single chip, simplifying implementation effort, reducing PCB real estate, all with the added benefit of faster and simpler design and production with higher yield. This led to the development of microcontrollers (MCUs) during the 1970s: single-chip computer systems that could be added to a new design for a minimal cost.
With the introduction of Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) to MCUs in the early 1990s, it first became possible to rewrite the program memory of MCUs repeatedly without having to resort to erasing memory content using ultraviolet light through a special quartz window in...
