Hardware Firmware Interface Design

Why care about hardware/firmware interaction? These interfaces are critical, a solid hardware design married with adaptive firmware can access all the capabilities of an application and overcome limitations caused by poor communication. For the first time, a book has come along that will help hardware engineers and firmware engineers work together to mitigate or eliminate problems that occur when hardware and firmware are not optimally compatible. Solving these issues will save time and money, getting products to market sooner to create more revenue. The principles and best practices presented in this book will prove to be a valuable resource for both hardware and firmware engineers. Topics include register layout, interrupts, timing and performance, aborts, and errors. Real world cases studies will help to solidify the principles and best practices with an aim towards cleaner designs, shorter schedules, and better implementation! Reduce product development delays with the best practices in this book Concepts apply to ASICs, ASSPs, SoCs, and FPGAs Real-world examples and case studies highlight the good and bad of design processes

Why care about hardware/firmware interaction? These interfaces are critical, a solid hardware design married with adaptive firmware can access all the capabilities of an application and overcome limitations caused by poor communication. For the first time, a book has come along that will help hardware engineers and firmware engineers work together to mitigate or eliminate problems that occur when hardware and firmware are not optimally compatible. Solving these issues will save time and money, getting products to market sooner to create more revenue. The principles and best practices presented in this book will prove to be a valuable resource for both hardware and firmware engineers. Topics include register layout, interrupts, timing and performance, aborts, and errors. Real world cases studies will help to solidify the principles and best practicies with an aim towards cleaner designs, shorter schedules, and better implementation! Reduce product development delays with the best practices in this book Concepts apply to ASICs, ASSPs, SoCs, and FPGAs Real-world examples and case studies highlight the good and bad of design processes

This book provides an overview of modern boot firmware, including the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and its associated EFI Developer Kit II (EDKII) firmware. The authors have each made significant contributions to developments in these areas. The reader will learn to use the latest developments in UEFI on modern hardware, including open source firmware and open hardware designs. The book begins with an exploration of interfaces exposed to higher-level software and operating systems, and commences to the left of the boot timeline, describing the flow of typical systems, beginning with the machine restart event. Software engineers working with UEFI will benefit greatly from this book, while specific sections of the book address topics relevant for a general audience: system architects, pre-operating-system application developers, operating system vendors (loader, kernel), independent hardware vendors (such as for plug-in adapters), and developers of end-user applications. As a secondary audience, project technical leaders or managers may be interested in this book to get a feel for what their engineers are doing. The reader will find: An overview of UEFI and underlying Platform Initialization (PI) specifications How to create UEFI applications and drivers Workflow to design the firmware solution for a modern platform Advanced usages of UEFI firmware for security and manageability

Embedded Firmware Solutions is the perfect introduction and daily-use field guide--for the thousands of firmware designers, hardware engineers, architects, managers, and developers--to Intel’s new firmware direction (including Quark coverage), showing how to integrate Intel® Architecture designs into their plans. Featuring hands-on examples and exercises using Open Source codebases, like Coreboot and EFI Development Kit (tianocore) and Chromebook, this is the first book that combines a timely and thorough overview of firmware solutions for the rapidly evolving embedded ecosystem with in-depth coverage of requirements and optimization.

The new RISC-V Edition of Computer Organization and Design features the RISC-V open source instruction set architecture, the first open source architecture designed to be used in modern computing environments such as cloud computing, mobile devices, and other embedded systems. With the post-PC era now upon us, Computer Organization and Design moves forward to explore this generational change with examples, exercises, and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the Cloud. Updated content featuring tablet computers, Cloud infrastructure, and the x86 (cloud computing) and ARM (mobile computing devices) architectures is included. An online companion Web site provides advanced content for further study, appendices, glossary, references, and recommended reading. Features RISC-V, the first such architecture designed to be used in modern computing environments, such as cloud computing, mobile devices, and other embedded systems Includes relevant examples, exercises, and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the cloud

Gain the knowledge and skills necessary to improve your embedded software and benefit from author Jacob Beningo’s more than 15 years developing reusable and portable software for resource-constrained microcontroller-based systems. You will explore APIs, HALs, and driver development among other topics to acquire a solid foundation for improving your own software. Reusable Firmware Development: A Practical Approach to APIs, HALs and Drivers not only explains critical concepts, but also provides a plethora of examples, exercises, and case studies on how to use and implement the concepts. What You'll Learn Develop portable firmware using the C programming language Discover APIs and HALs, explore their differences, and see why they are important to developers of resource-constrained software Master microcontroller driver development concepts, strategies, and examples Write drivers that are reusable across multiple MCU families and vendors Improve the way software documented Design APIs and HALs for microcontroller-based systems Who This Book Is For Those with some prior experience with embedded programming.

Intelligent readers who want to build their own embedded computer systems-- installed in everything from cell phones to cars to handheld organizers to refrigerators-- will find this book to be the most in-depth, practical, and up-to-date guide on the market. Designing Embedded Hardware carefully steers between the practical and philosophical aspects, so developers can both create their own devices and gadgets and customize and extend off-the-shelf systems. There are hundreds of books to choose from if you need to learn programming, but only a few are available if you want to learn to create hardware. Designing Embedded Hardware provides software and hardware engineers with no prior experience in embedded systems with the necessary conceptual and design building blocks to understand the architectures of embedded systems. Written to provide the depth of coverage and real-world examples developers need, Designing Embedded Hardware also provides a road-map to the pitfalls and traps to avoid in designing embedded systems. Designing Embedded Hardware covers such essential topics as: The principles of developing computer hardware Core hardware designs Assembly language concepts Parallel I/O Analog-digital conversion Timers (internal and external) UART Serial Peripheral Interface Inter-Integrated Circuit Bus Controller Area Network (CAN) Data Converter Interface (DCI) Low-power operation This invaluable and eminently useful book gives you the practical tools and skills to develop, build, and program your own application-specific computers.

The book is designed to serve as a textbook for courses offered to graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in electronics and electrical engineering and computer science. This book attempts to bridge the gap between electronics and computer science students, providing complementary knowledge that is essential for designing an embedded system. The book covers key concepts tailored for embedded system design in one place. The topics covered in this book are models and architectures, Executable Specific Languages – SystemC, Unified Modeling Language, real-time systems, real-time operating systems, networked embedded systems, Embedded Processor architectures, and platforms that are secured and energy-efficient. A major segment of embedded systems needs hard real-time requirements. This textbook includes real-time concepts including algorithms and real-time operating system standards like POSIX threads. Embedded systems are mostly distributed and networked for deterministic responses. The book covers how to design networked embedded systems with appropriate protocols for real-time requirements. Each chapter contains 2-3 solved case studies and 10 real-world problems as exercises to provide detailed coverage and essential pedagogical tools that make this an ideal textbook for students enrolled in electrical and electronics engineering and computer science programs.