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September 30, 2006
Published by Gary Stringham at September 30, 2006
Categories
A few years ago, I was invited to a high-level design review of a new SoC. The proposed design contained an I/O block that needed features added. I successfully convinced them to replace that block instead with an existing block that had the needed features, had seen silicon, and had […]
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October 31, 2006
Published by Gary Stringham at October 31, 2006
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Several years ago I came across a register that, at first glance, seemed to be a typical register with several read/write bits. Upon closer inspection, I saw that one bit behaved differently, depending on its state and whether I was writing a 1 or a 0 to it. Since firmware […]
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November 30, 2006
Published by Gary Stringham at November 30, 2006
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A common question engineers often wrestle with is how long hardware will take to do a requested task so firmware can take the next step. Engineers implement different designs (both in hardware and firmware) depending on the length of time, and these designs have varying impacts on hardware and firmware […]
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December 30, 2006
Published by Gary Stringham at December 30, 2006
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On an ASIC, my ISR had to write a 1 in one place and a 0 in another place to acknowledge (ack) the interrupt. The hardware engineer I talked to tried to explain how one was an interrupt bit so that is why it needed a 1, but the other […]
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January 31, 2007
Published by Gary Stringham at January 31, 2007
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Late in the development of a new printer, a third-party print engine that interfaced with a block on the ASIC changed its interface behavior. The print engine would quit sending pulses before the block was done with its job, causing the block to hang waiting for more pulses. This behavior […]
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February 28, 2007
Published by Gary Stringham at February 28, 2007
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After a presentation I gave at a conference, one of the attendees came up and told me about his ASIC design team that consisted of young engineers. They had completed their design and told him that they were done. He then asked the question, “Six months from now when you […]
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March 31, 2007
Published by Gary Stringham at March 31, 2007
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One of the rules of the Extreme Programming design philosophy for software is Never Add Functionality Early. This means that when coding for one product, do not add features or functionality needed for a future product. While this rule does have some merit for software development, it should be applied […]
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April 30, 2007
Published by Gary Stringham at April 30, 2007
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In a survey I conducted of several firmware engineers, lack of good documentation of hardware was the number one complaint. It is because firmware engineers so heavily rely on the hardware documentation to correctly do their job. Some of the engineers said that wrong documentation is worse than no documentation […]
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May 31, 2007
Published by Gary Stringham at May 31, 2007
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A printer ASIC was designed to be just a PCI Express endpoint so some of the configuration registers were hard-coded as such and it was used in a printer model. Sometime later, for a new printer model, the engineers wanted to use the ASIC as a root complex to bridge […]
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June 30, 2007
Published by Gary Stringham at June 30, 2007
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One of the more challenging aspects of an embedded systems design is to maximize the time hardware and firmware can work independently while minimizing the time they have to wait for each other. The proper use and sizing of buffers can help balance the load between hardware and firmware. An […]
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