Most electronic boards nowadays are using factory programmable chips. It
simplifies the electronic engineering effort and allows to reduce the cycle of
redesigning Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) and thus reducing development
time, effort and costs. Such software which is programmed into electronic components
is called Firmware.
Firmware Engineering is a meta discipline which requires adequate knowledge
in Software and Electronic Engineering. We develop Firmware for all kinds of
scenarios and electronic components. Typical electronic components are:
Microcontrollers are small microprocessors, which are intended as
programmable general purpose control units of electronic circuits. They are usually
produced as a single chip, which already encapsulates typical computer components
like CPU, RAM and I/O interfaces. Even though they run with much lower clock rates
than famous PC and Mac processors, they are able to react on events and process
them much faster than a big computer system could do, since microcontrollers are not
running an Operating System and are much more dedicated to small tasks on an
electronic board. You can find them in almost any electronic product nowadays, even
in toasters and the most simple coffee machine. Since microcontrollers are produced
in much larger quantities than other microprocessors of i.e. PCs, microcontrollers
are quite inexpensive electronic components, available on the market starting from
DSPs or Digital Signal Processors are microprocessors specialized for
very fast processing of digital signals. Whereas microcontrollers are usually
utilized for simple controlling tasks, which usually only requires a small amount of
computational power, DSPs are rather used for applications where more complex
mathematical algorithms have to be applied to incoming digital data streams. They are
especially used in cases where signals have to be processed in a very limited range
of time, thus in time-critical low latency scenarios.
Configurable ASICs: Besides such general purpose components listed above,
there are numerous application specific ICs on the market, which allow
to be configured for various scenarios by programming an EEPROM component
appropriately, i.e. ICs for PCI cards, which can be configured for the exact
purpose of the card.
» IC Design
You have questions about our firmware engineering service? Don't hesitate to
contact us, we are happy to give you answers!
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