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Creating a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) in C

Jacob Beningo October 23, 20233 comments

In my last post, C to C++: Using Abstract Interfaces to Create Hardware Abstraction Layers (HAL), I discussed how vital hardware abstraction layers are and how to use a C++ abstract interface to create them. You may be thinking, that’s great for C++, but I work in C! How do I create a HAL that can easily swap in and out different drivers? In today’s post, I will walk through exactly how to do that while using the I2C bus as an example.


Elliptic Curve Cryptography - Key Exchange and Signatures

Mike October 21, 2023

Elliptic curve mathematics over finite fields helps solve the problem of exchanging secret keys for encrypted messages as well as proving a specific person signed a particular document. This article goes over simple algorithms for key exchange and digital signature using elliptic curve mathematics. These methods are the essence of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) used in applications such as SSH, TLS and HTTPS.


What does it mean to be 'Turing complete'?

Nathan Jones October 16, 20235 comments

The term "Turing complete" describes all computers and even some things we don't expect to be as powerful as a typical computer. In this article, I describe what it means and discuss the implications of Turing completeness on projects that need just a little more power, on alternative processor designs, and even security.


Elliptic Curve Cryptography - Security Considerations

Mike October 16, 2023

The security of elliptic curve cryptography is determined by the elliptic curve discrete log problem. This article explains what that means. A comparison with real number logarithm and modular arithmetic gives context for why it is called a log problem.


Handling Translations in an Embedded Project

Mattia Maldini October 13, 20234 comments

A brief walkthrough on how to handle human language translations in a low level C application. Some options are listed, each with advantages and disadvantages laid out.


Elliptic Curve Cryptography - Basic Math

Mike October 10, 2023

An introduction to the math of elliptic curves for cryptography. Covers the basic equations of points on an elliptic curve and the concept of point addition as well as multiplication.


Square root in fixed point VHDL

Jari Honkanen October 10, 20231 comment

In this blog we will design and implement a fixed point square root function in VHDL. The algorithm is based on the recursive Newton Raphson inverse square root algorithm and the implementation offers parametrizable pipeline depth, word length and the algorithm is built with VHDL records and procedures for easy use.


Mastering Modern FPGA Skills for Engineers

Lance Harvie October 5, 2023

In the rapidly evolving tech industry, engineers must acquire proficiency in modern FPGA skills. These skills empower engineers to optimize designs, minimize resource usage, and efficiently address FPGA design challenges while ensuring functionality, security, and compliance.


Open-Source Licenses Made Easy with Buildroot and Yocto for Embedded Linux

George Emad October 2, 2023

In this article I will try to explain what are the copyrights/copyleft, what are the popular opensource software licenses, and how to make sure that your Embedded Linux system complies with them using popular build systems ; Buildroot or YOCTO projec


There are 10 kinds of people in the world

Colin Walls September 27, 2023

It is useful, in embedded software, to be able to specify values in binary. The C language lacks this facility. In this blog we look at how to fix that.


Cortex-M Exception Handling (Part 2)

Ivan Cibrario Bertolotti February 1, 20169 comments

The first part of this article described the conditions for an exception request to be accepted by a Cortex-M processor, mainly concerning the relationship of its priority with respect to the current execution priority. This part will describe instead what happens after an exception request is accepted and becomes active.

PROCESSOR OPERATION AND PRIVILEGE MODE

Before discussing in detail the sequence of actions that occurs within the processor after an exception request...


C to C++: Using Abstract Interfaces to Create Hardware Abstraction Layers (HAL)

Jacob Beningo September 21, 20235 comments

In C to C++, we've been exploring how to transition from a C developer to a C++ developer when working in embedded system. In this post, we will explore how to leverage classes to create hardware abstraction layers (HAL). You'll learn about the various inheritance mechanisms, what an virtual function is, and how to create an abstract class.


Best Firmware Architecture Attributes

Tayyar GUZEL June 4, 20166 comments

Architecture of a firmware (FW) in a way defines the life-cycle of your product. Often companies start with a simple-version of a product as a response to the time-to-market caveat of the business, make some cash out of the product with a simple feature set. It takes only less than 2-3 years to reach a point where the company needs to develop multiple products derived from the same code base and multiple teams need to develop...


The CRC Wild Goose Chase: PPP Does What?!?!?!

Jason Sachs October 23, 20142 comments

I got a bad feeling yesterday when I had to include reference information about a 16-bit CRC in a serial protocol document I was writing. And I knew it wasn’t going to end well.

The last time I looked into CRC algorithms was about five years ago. And the time before that… sometime back in 2004 or 2005? It seems like it comes up periodically, like the seventeen-year locust or sunspots or El Niño,...


Tolerance Analysis

Jason Sachs May 31, 2020

Today we’re going to talk about tolerance analysis. This is a topic that I have danced around in several previous articles, but never really touched upon in its own right. The closest I’ve come is Margin Call, where I discussed several different techniques of determining design margin, and ran through some calculations to justify that it was safe to allow a certain amount of current through an IRFP260N MOSFET.

Tolerance analysis...


First-Order Systems: The Happy Family

Jason Sachs May 3, 20141 comment
Все счастли́вые се́мьи похо́жи друг на дру́га, ка́ждая несчастли́вая семья́ несчастли́ва по-сво́ему.

— Лев Николаевич Толстой, Анна Каренина

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— Lev Nicholaevich Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I was going to write an article about second-order systems, but then realized that it would be...


Lessons Learned from Embedded Code Reviews (Including Some Surprises)

Jason Sachs August 16, 20152 comments

My software team recently finished a round of code reviews for some of our motor controller code. I learned a lot from the experience, most notably why you would want to have code reviews in the first place.

My background is originally from the medical device industry. In the United States, software in medical devices gets a lot of scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration, and for good reason; it’s a place for complexity to hide latent bugs. (Can you say “


Review: Embedded Software Design: A Practical Approach to Architecture, Processes, and Coding Techniques

Steve Branam February 28, 2023
Introduction

Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book to review.

Embedded Software Design: A Practical Approach to Architecture, Processes, and Coding Techniques, by Jacob Beningo, is an excellent introduction to strategies for embedded systems design and bringing those designs to fruition. Renowned embedded systems expert Jack Ganssle was the technical reviewer.

This is a practical how-to book on the modern professional practice of embedded systems...


Supply Chain Games: What Have We Learned From the Great Semiconductor Shortage of 2021? (Part 3)

Jason Sachs December 10, 2022

Hello again! Today we’re going to take a closer look at Moore’s Law, semiconductor foundries, and semiconductor economics — and a game that explores the effect of changing economics on the supply chain.

We’ll try to answer some of these questions:

  • What does Moore’s Law really mean, and how does it impact the economics of semiconductor manufacturing?
  • How does the foundry business model work, and how is it affected by the different mix of technology...

Signal Processing Contest in Python (PREVIEW): The Worst Encoder in the World

Jason Sachs September 7, 20136 comments

When I posted an article on estimating velocity from a position encoder, I got a number of responses. A few of them were of the form "Well, it's an interesting article, but at slow speeds why can't you just take the time between the encoder edges, and then...." My point was that there are lots of people out there which take this approach, and don't take into account that the time between encoder edges varies due to manufacturing errors in the encoder. For some reason this is a hard concept...


The 2025 Embedded Online Conference