This book discusses the programmability and reconfigurability of modern full featured embedded systems along with current trends in interfacing methods. This book also introduces tools that allow embedded system developers to easily program for their specific embedded system hierarchy and deal with multiple levels of complexity using the C language, while exposing the feature rich functionality of embedded operating systems. Furthermore, this book considers the cost of developing software that is built with the specific intension of being fault-tolerant. In the past, cost has rarely attracted the attention of the fault tolerance and dependable computing research communities. Thus, finding a way to produce fault-tolerant, safety-critical systems in a cost-efficient manner should allow many of these necessary software systems to be built. Other chapters in this book examine the development of embedded control systems for automotive applications, the methods for reliability evaluation of communication network systems, the static and dynamic configurable ASIP architectures, and the communication infrastructures which are vital in handling the design of such systems.