The new Armv8-M architecture from arm® with its Cortex®-M23 and Cortex®-M33 processors is quickly gaining steam in the industry. The Armv8-M architecture includes a new security extension known as TrustZone that will revolutionize and forever change the way that embedded software developers create microcontroller-based systems. Below are my top seven tips to help you get … Continue reading 7 Tips for Getting Started with TrustZone for MCU’s
Every development team needs to make the decision as to whether they will design and build their software from scratch or buy software components. In many instances, the decision is not driven so much by a business decision as it is by engineer ego shouting, “I can do it faster and better than they can!”. … Continue reading The Firmware Conundrum: Build or Buy
In “Improve Debug Efficiency with the ITM”, I discussed how the ITM on the Arm® Cortex-M processors can be used to quickly, and efficiently print debug information to a coresight terminal. We saw that the ITM is extremely fast, much faster than a UART which minimizes the overhead associated with printing log and debug information … Continue reading Writing a Multi-Port ITM Function to Improve Debugging
Embedded software developers have grown used to working at the lowest, nitty gritty hardware level within a microcontroller based system. Twiddling and manipulating bits and bytes is what embedded software developers were born to do. The embedded software industry is changing and that change is requiring developers to start working at higher levels of abstraction … Continue reading 7 Tips for Developing Great API’s
TrustZone for Cortex-M processors is on the way! There has already been an announcement from Nuvoton that they will be releasing the worlds first Cortex-M23 processor, the Cortex-M2351, that will include support for Arm TrustZone. The problem for many IoT developers though is that they are ready to start learning TrustZone now but don’t have … Continue reading Getting Started using Arm® TrustZone® for Cortex®-M Processors
Let’s face it. No matter how sophisticated our debug tools get, there will always be a place for an old fashioned printf statement. Unfortunately, printf tends be efficient and can dramatically affect the systems real-time performance. For developers using an Arm Cortex®-M3 or better, printf can be remapped to the Instrumentation Trace Macrocell (ITM) which … Continue reading Improve Debug Efficiency with the ITM
Figuring out how to size the stack for an embedded application and the tasks within it can be challenging. In many cases, developers will pick a value that they feel should be enough. These estimates are sometimes a little short, most of the time a gross estimation and rarely spot on. While I always encourage … Continue reading 3 Ways to Perform a Worst-Case Stack Analysis
There are many techniques and processes that developers can follow in order to minimize the defects (bugs) that find their way into embedded software. No matter how carefully one develops their software, there is always going to be a few that sneak through and require us to troubleshoot (debug) the software. In this post, we … Continue reading Evaluating and Mastering Real-Time Debugging Techniques
I recently wrote an article for embedded.com entitled “A Peek Inside Amazon FreeRTOS” where I started to analyze the high-level behavior that the Amazon FreeRTOS application exhibits while running on an STM32F475 IoT Discovery Node. In this post, I will continue the analysis by demonstrating how a developer can follow the communication flow and examine … Continue reading Amazon FreeRTOS: Behind the Scenes
The very terminology that we use when developing embedded software can set our perspective and have potentially devastating effects on our ability to deliver successfully. The most commonly used term to describe an issue with software is that “there is a bug” or that the code is “buggy”. The term bug implies that there is … Continue reading Bugs and Errors and Defects, Oh My!
