In today's world, embedded systems are everywhere -- homes, offices, cars, factories, hospitals, plans and consumer electronics. Their huge numbers and new complexity call for a new design approach, one that emphasizes high-level tools and hardware/software tradeoffs, rather than low-level assembly-language programming and logic design. This book presents the traditionally distinct fields of software and hardware design in a new unified approach. It covers trends and challenges, introduces the design and use of single-purpose processors ("hardware") and general-purpose processors ("software"), describes memories and buses, illustrates hardware/software tradeoffs using a digital camera example, and discusses advanced computation models, control systems, chip technologies, and modern design tools.