Embedded Systems and Chip Design Consultant
Improving Hardware/Firmware Integration

Gary Stringham & Associates is consulting and training firm that works with your hardware and firmware (embedded software) engineers to reduce chip respins, improve the hardware/firmware integration efforts, and improve the quality and time-to-market of your products.

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High Respin Rate? Delayed Product Release?

Are you incurring chip respins costing more than $1,000,000 and 8-week delays? Are problems integrating your firmware with your ASICs, FPGAs, SoCs, or ASSPs costing $12,500 for each engineering-month of delay? Is your product among the more than 55 percent that will be delivered late? Do you tend to come up with band-aid fixes that cost you in the long run?

We specialize in the hardware/firmware interface, from the early planning and development phases to the turn-on and integration phases. Our concepts and methodologies help your hardware and firmware teams eliminate many errors early in the design and mitigate errors that do show up later. This increases productivity and quality, and reduces respins, delays, and costs.

“Thanks for doing such a great job of establishing for me a firmware driver mindset that can play an important role in our ASIC design decisions.” Jack Meador, Hewlett-Packard Co.

How can we help you address your hardware/firmware integration challenges? Here are a few ideas.

• Best Practices Workshop: Sign up your engineers for this workshop to generate your own set of best practices customized for your company that could save you millions in your development costs, reduced respins, and quality improvements.
  “I just wanted to tell you that your class was incredibly valuable!” Keith Huster, Hill-Rom

• Hardware Design Audit: Submit your hardware design documentation to an audit against over 200 criteria to catch errors and problems before tape out.
  

• Register Design Tools: Review various commercially-available register design tools that keep your hardware, firmware, and documentation files in sync.

• Book: Order the book, Hardware/Firmware Interface Design: Best Practices for Improving Embedded Systems Development, which contains over 300 best practices for your embedded systems development.
  “I'm confident that this well-written book will serve as the launching pad for important discussions for many engineers working at the hardware-firmware interface.” Michael Barr, Netrino

These and other consulting offerings will help you architect your embedded systems product and get your hardware and firmware teams to more closely work together. Contact us via or call 208-939-6984 for more info.

Gary Stringham & Associates
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