Planning ahead

January 31, 2007

Accommodating Product Changes

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 […]
March 31, 2007

Designing a Chip for Unplanned Products

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 […]
July 31, 2007

More on Buffer Zones

In last month’s newsletter I talked about analyzing the size of buffers. Now I will discuss the importance of proper management support for buffers – support in terms of status, interrupts, and errors. For example, when should an interrupt be generated on the receiving buffer? When one byte arrives? When […]
October 30, 2010

Principle 7: Plan Ahead

This is the last in the series of newsletters that present seven principles to help guide your own processes and best practices in hardware/firmware interface design. This month’s principle focuses on the future. People who look to the future toward retirement prepare now by putting away money. Those who are […]