Designing for compatibility means to design in such a way as to facilitate, where possible, the ability for any version of firmware and any version of hardware to be paired up. Cell phones are a good ...

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a large amount of my time consulting with and training software development teams that were in the midst of rearchitecture. These teams had already developed the ...

In many instances of microcontroller firmware design, it's necessary, or desirable, to take four individual bytes and access them as if they were a single 32-bit variable, maybe as a pair of 16-bit ...

A lever long enough can move anything. As Archimedes put it, "Give me where to stand, and I will move the Earth." Were that sage alive today, he might apply the same reasoning to the equally imposing ...

Teams developing firmware and embedded software often develop their software on-target. While there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with using a development board to understand the processor, ...

Every developer and team I’ve ever met has wanted to deliver quality firmware to their customers. No one starts out saying, “I want to deliver a buggy, unusable product to my customer.” Yet, how often ...

To understand the transition from legacy BIOS to UEFI firmware, it’s best to begin with a review of a decades-old system—the 1983 IBM-compatible PC—and continue with a study of its successor ...

Editor's Note: Designing a robust hardware/firmware interface is not a simple process. It's no accident that engineers charged with this task are generally the more senior and experienced engineers on ...