Grading a Microcontroller: A Travelling Salesman Problem Application

One of the most financial and temporal investments in embedded systems business is the decision involved in selecting the right components, in particular, the microcontroller. Each microcontroller is made for a particular application. Since, with time, the applications get more complex, the lifespan of existing microcontrollers gets reduced. Currently industry chooses microcontrollers in an unsystematic manner, thus reducing the possibilities of employing a perfectly suited microcontroller, albeit originally meant for a different application. This paper solves this dilemma by using a modified version of travelling salesman problem to grade microcontroller and find out to what extents it would be successful when used in other applications(except for the one it was designed for). This paper starts by mentioning a few common applications of embedded systems and what differentiates them. Then the proposed grading process is described and correlated with TSP, solvable by genetic algorithms.