Single Purpose Processors

A single purpose processor is a digital circuit designed to execute exactly one program.An embedded system designer may create a single purpose processor by designing a custom digital circuit.Alternatively,the designer may purchase a predesigned single purpose processor.Many people refer to this part of the implementation simply as the hardware portion,although even software requires a hardware processor on which to run.A single purpose processor when used in embedded systems,it has both advantages and disadvantages over the general purpose processors.If we look at the advantages of the single purpose processor,then by using single purpose processor performance may be fast,size is small,less power consumption and low unit cost for large quantities.On the other hand its disadvantages are very high design time,high NRE costs,low flexibility and high unit cost for small quantities.