The LPC17xx Cortex M3 microcontroller from NXP is ideally suited to deeply embedded realtime

applications. Typically, applications of this type include a mix of both hard and soft realtime

requirements.

Soft real-time requirements are those that state a time deadline—but breaching the deadline

would not render the system useless. For example, responding to keystrokes too slowly may

make a system seem annoyingly unresponsive without actually making it unusable.