Jonathan Valvano has been teaching microcontrollers and embedded systems at the University of Texas at Austin for 30 years. This is his fourth college textbook. His previous three textbooks on the Freescale 9S12 have been used at over 18 universities around the world. He earned his BS and MS from MIT in 1977 in the fields of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. In 1981, he received his PhD from Harvard-MIT in the field of biomedical engineering. He has over 100 journal papers, 9 book chapters and 10 patents in the medical device research area. He is a cofounder of a successful medical device company, specializing in miniature and low-power cardiac measurements. The reason he has… received numerous teaching awards at the University of Texas is because he and his students share a common interest at the very core of the education process: the students' own success. "It is difficult to find a professor that tries harder to educate and inspire his students than Professor Valvano" - Robin Tsang.