Designing the firmware fault path: error vs fault, recovery worst-case timing, I2C bus recovery, supervised watchdogs and evidence that survives a reset.
Author: Chintan Gala
State Machine Architecture in Embedded Systems: Designing Deterministic Event-Driven Firmware
Designing embedded state machines that hold up in production: run-to-completion, timeout transitions, four implementations costed, and exhaustive FSM testing.
RTOS Architecture: How to Design Tasks, Queues, Events, Timers and Synchronisation
Deriving an RTOS task table with rate-monotonic analysis, plus the three places the analysis breaks on real hardware — cache variance, sporadic load, blocking.
HAL vs BSP vs Driver vs Middleware: Where Should Firmware Code Actually Belong?
Where firmware code actually belongs: the reason-to-change test, peripheral vs device drivers, and eight boundary cases that get argued in every code review.
15 Firmware Architecture Anti-Patterns That Make Embedded Systems Unmaintainable
Fifteen firmware architecture anti-patterns, each with a measurable tell you can run today: a grep, a runtime stat or a scope trace, before the fix gets costly.
How to Design a Production-Grade Firmware Architecture
A production firmware architecture built end to end on STM32H7: task table, memory map, ownership matrix, dependency rules and error propagation.
Embedded Firmware Architecture Fundamentals: How Engineers Actually Decide
How experienced engineers pick an embedded firmware architecture: the evolution ladder, a decision tree with real thresholds, and what to rank first.
Embedded DSA Interview Questions: Hashing and Complexity (Q219–Q248)
Part 7 of the embedded DSA interview guide: 30 worked questions on hash tables, collision resolution, load factor, perfect hashing, Bloom filters, LRU caches and Big O analysis.
Firmware Architecture Interview Questions: 100 Q&A for Senior and Staff Engineers
One hundred firmware architecture interview questions and answers across system architecture, RTOS vs bare-metal vs Linux, OTA updates and rollback, and bootloader design and secure boot.
Embedded DSA Interview Questions: Heap and Sorting (Q189–Q218)
Part 6 of the embedded DSA interview guide: 30 worked questions on binary heaps, heapify, timer queues, and every major sorting algorithm with the embedded trade-offs spelled out.
