Course Overview

Course Length: 
1 Day
CEUs: 
0.7
Format: 
Hands-on/Lecture

Avoid costly chip respins and system integration delays with best practices customized to your company. Implementing these best practices will save your company time and money and increase the quality of your products. In this workshop, we present approximately 300 best practices of hardware/firmware interface design and explore the fundamental principles underlying them. We teach engineers how to customize and adapt these best practices for your specific development processes. Your engineers will emerge from the workshop with a set of best practices tailored to your environment.

Topics covered during this course include:

  • Introduction to Hardware/Firmware Interface
  • Collaboration
  • Planning
  • Documentation
  • Superblock
  • Design
  • Registers
  • Interrupts
  • Handling Errors
  • Hooks
  • Firmware

This course is appropriate for:

  • Embedded software developers
  • Electrical engineers, including PCB, FPGA, and ASIC designers

Prerequisites:  Attendees should have prior exposure to the hardware-software interface, device drivers, and related topics.

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Syllabus

The following is summary of the major course topics and should not be considered the section-by-subsection lecture breakdown.

Introduction

  • What Is the Hardware/Firmware Interface?
  • What Is a Best Practice?
  • “First Time Right"
  • Project Life Cycle
  • Case Study
  • Seven Principles

Collaboration

  • First Steps
  • Formal Collaboration
  • Informal Collaboration

Planning

  • Industry Standards
  • Common Version
  • Compatibility
  • Defects
  • Analysis
  • Post Mortem

Documentation

  • Types
  • Document Management
  • Reviews
  • Content
  • Registers
  • Bits
  • Interrupts
  • Time
  • Errors
  • Information

Superblock

  • Benefits of a Superblock
  • Consolidation
  • I/O Signals
  • Parameterization

Design

  • Event Notification
  • Performance
  • Power-On
  • Communication & Control

Registers

  • Addressing
  • Bit Assignment
  • Data Types
  • Hardware Identification
  • Communication & Control

Interrupts

  • Design
  • Pending Register
  • Enable Register
  • Optional Registers
  • Interrupt Module Review
  • Triggering on Both Edges
  • Using the Interrupt Module

Handling Errors

  • Definitions
  • Halts
  • Resets
  • Aborts

Hooks

  • Designing for Hooks
  • Peek and Poke
  • Monitor
  • More Hooks

Firmware

  • Configuration Management
  • Temporary Hooks
  • Permanent Hooks

Wrap-Up

  • Key Takeaways
  • Seven Principles Review
  • Ship It!

Related Courses

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Contact us now to find out more about this course or to enquire about an on-site training at your company.

Recording Policy

Barr Group's courses may not be audiotaped, videotaped, or photographed without consent from Barr Group's executive team.