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June 30, 2008
Published by Gary Stringham at June 30, 2008
Categories
We have all dealt with the pain of inaccurate and out-of-date register information. Registers and bits are modified in hardware but the documents are not updated. Documents are updated but firmware is not changed. Or typos are introduced along the way. Failure to catch these problems typically results in hours […]
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July 31, 2008
Published by Gary Stringham at July 31, 2008
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A few years ago in my search for hardware/firmware best practices, I came across a series of “Firmware Friendly” articles written by David Fechser of LSI Logic. (See Related Links on my website.) In one of his articles, “Firmware-friendly reset design,” Fechser discusses three levels of hardware reset. The following […]
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August 30, 2008
Published by Gary Stringham at August 30, 2008
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Since the last issue, I had an interesting email discussion regarding resets with one of my readers, Jay Dowling. Jay comes from a background of designing safety-critical devices for use in harsh environments and has a different perspective on resets. During our discussion, Jay brought up a useful distinction between […]
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September 30, 2008
Published by Gary Stringham at September 30, 2008
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In one of the chapters for my forthcoming best practices book, I discuss the importance of informal collaboration between hardware and firmware engineers. When an engineer on one team has a problem, there should be very little, if any, organizational barriers to prevent going directly to a member of the […]
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October 31, 2008
Published by Gary Stringham at October 31, 2008
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Many blocks have input and output signals connected to pins or other blocks on the chip. As needed, associated firmware will control or read the levels of those I/O signals either directly or indirectly. Some of those I/O signals are optional and whether or not they’re used in a given […]
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November 29, 2008
Published by Gary Stringham at November 29, 2008
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Inside each block in a chip is an interrupt module that monitors signals from multiple interrupt sources within the block. These interrupt sources can be from state machines, counters, combinatorial logic, external signals, or other such sources. When an interrupt source asserts, it triggers the interrupt module to latch the […]
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December 31, 2008
Published by Gary Stringham at December 31, 2008
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In the last article, I stated “I see no benefit to level-triggered interrupts. … If you believe otherwise, let me know…” and you did. First, a clarification: Your responses let me know that my use of the term “interrupt module” was the source of some confusion about last month’s article. […]
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January 31, 2009
Published by Gary Stringham at January 31, 2009
Categories
When engineers talk about compatibility, they often pose a binary question: Are two things compatible with each other or not? However, in my experience, the question of compatibility is not so cut-and-dried. For hardware-firmware integration, at least, compatibility is a matter of degree. Early in the development of a new […]
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February 28, 2009
Published by Gary Stringham at February 28, 2009
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Countdown timers (and counters) are used in many applications to generate an interrupt if some event does not occur within a specified time. One example is a watchdog timer, that, if firmware does not poke it in time, it will generate an interrupt. Another use is to watch for when […]
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March 30, 2009
Published by Gary Stringham at March 30, 2009
Categories
In response to last month’s article about countdown counters, Jay Dowling states that he does not use countdown counters at all, but only uses countup counters. This allows him to design only countup counters, instead of also designing countdown counters and up/down counters. Plus, counters that count up only require […]
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