Blog

A reader brought up a useful distinction between a power-on reset and a hard reset. Some things are done only at power on.

Guidelines for the control that hardware modules and firmware code should have over different types of hardware reset.

Failure to catch documentation problems typically results in hours wasted on debugging that could and should have been avoided.

A chicken and egg problem: How can we know whether or not a downstream master is idle without switching to that bus to check its activity?

The register table from last month now indicates the access type, read/write or read-only, of the bits in the register.

Documentation plays a key role in this effort since engineers must refer to it constantly to look up register and bit details.

Engineers love to measure things and assign a number. But how do you measure something intangible? You can’t.

Since DMA controllers are instantiated in many blocks, the DMA controller is a good place to put additional debugging tools.

The current values of the address and byte count registers in the DMA controllers can provide clues to troubleshoot the problem.

Porting firmware code to a new hardware platform often requires making changes that break support for old platforms.