Firmware Design

Firmware is the foundation of your product, yet apart from providing a stable base on which to build your application, it contributes the least to your product's competitiveness in the marketplace. Trouble-shooting firmware issues diverts your engineers from developing the software that makes your product unique.

Risks

• Project Milestone Delays There is a real danger of a cascading effect where your best application engineers are brought in to resolve firmware issues, delaying the code modules to which they were originally assigned.
• Application/Firmware Entanglement Unless isolation of firmware and application code is designed in it is almost inevitable that code that talks directly to hardware registers will appear scattered throughout the application. This leads to testability issues - how do you ensure that all changes to register contents are consistent? How can you be sure that functions read values from registers only when it is safe to do so? It also commits much of your application code to a single hardware platform.

Software development is expensive - the decisions you make now can protect your investment and ensure you bring your product to market faster when you move to the next generation of your hardware.

Solution

Bring CodeSprite's ARM and firmware development expertise into your team. We'll work with your engineers to ensure that the firmware is ideally suited to the application they are developing, while maintaining a standard of portability.

A properly isolated and specified firmware layer will streamline your project, allowing platform and application development to proceed in parallel. The most effective example of this that CodeSprite worked on, allowed teams from six different OEM companies worldwide to develop applications before final hardware was available. The bottom layer of the firmware was ported from the initial prototype hardware to the new hardware with a different processor core and peripheral set in five days; all the applications from the different OEM companies were linked with the new firmware and executed without any change to the application code.

Why CodeSprite?

CodeSprite has extensive experience in the development and trouble-shooting of embedded systems of all varieties since the 1980's, and ARM systems since 1995. CodeSprite's founder Peter Maloy worked for ARM for nearly five years, and has since been involved during the consultation period for the ARM Architecture 6 instruction set. He was also a technical reviewer for a forthcoming book by ARM employees on ARM System Software design and optimization.

Email today and we'll call you back to discuss how CodeSprite can work with your team for firmware development or problem resolution.