How experienced engineers pick an embedded firmware architecture: the evolution ladder, a decision tree with real thresholds, and what to rank first.
Tag: RTOS
Real time operating system
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: Stack and Queue (Q124–Q153)
Part 4 of the embedded DSA interview guide: 30 worked questions on stacks, shunting yard, stack overflow detection, circular queues, ring buffers, ISR to task handoff and RTOS queues.
Embedded DSA Interview Questions: Recursion and Linked Lists (Q74–Q123)
Part 3 of the embedded DSA interview guide: 50 worked questions on recursion, stack depth, MISRA 17.2, singly and doubly linked lists, Floyd’s cycle detection, intrusive lists and pool allocators.
FreeRTOS Queues on STM32: Copy Semantics, the ISR Boundary, and the Anti-Patterns That Cause Silent Data Loss
Most FreeRTOS queue tutorials stop at xQueueSend and xQueueReceive — the two calls that were never the hard part. They show you a producer task,
Event-Driven Firmware Architecture
Most write-ups on event-driven firmware stop at the conceptual layer: events decouple modules, a queue holds them, a dispatcher routes them. That part is easy
Hierarchical State Machines (HSM) in C for Telecom and RF Firmware
In telecom, RF, SATCOM, and industrial communication products, firmware coordinates dozens of subsystems that all run at once: PLL lock supervision, thermal protection, VSWR monitoring,
ISR Integration — ISR-safe APIs, the syscall-priority boundary, and deferred interrupt processing
Previously: Semaphore vs Mutex | Next: Heap Management Why ISRs Are Different — The One Rule You Cannot Break An Interrupt Service Routine runs outside
The Interrupt Pattern in Embedded Systems
Introduction In embedded systems, responsiveness and timing precision are often critical. When a hardware event occurs — such as a GPIO edge, UART byte received,
The Polling Pattern in Embedded Systems
Introduction In many embedded systems, it’s not always possible — or practical — to use interrupts. Some peripherals don’t provide interrupt lines, others generate events
