Technical Fundamentals & Core Skills Topics
Core technical concepts including algorithms, data structures, statistics, cryptography, and hardware-software integration. Covers foundational knowledge required for technical roles and advanced technical depth.
Event Driven and Interrupt Handling
Covers the principles of event driven programming and low level interrupt handling as used in embedded and real time systems. Topics include what interrupts are, how interrupt service routines work, interrupt priorities and nesting, masking and disabling interrupts, and trade offs between latency and throughput. Also includes event driven design patterns such as callbacks, event loops, debouncing and throttling, handling concurrency and race conditions that arise from asynchronous events, and techniques for protecting critical sections and ensuring atomicity. Candidates should be able to reason about timing constraints, real time requirements, hardware versus software events, and design simple handlers and coordination mechanisms for safe, timely response to external events.
Hardware Interfaces and Protocols
Practical knowledge of embedded hardware interfaces and low level communication buses used to connect sensors, actuators, and peripheral devices to microcontrollers and processors. Topics include Inter Integrated Circuit (I2C), Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART), Controller Area Network (CAN) bus and their timing, framing, clocking, and electrical characteristics; general purpose input output (GPIO) and analog input and output including analog to digital and digital to analog conversion; signal integrity, pull ups and pull downs, level shifting, termination, and common electrical pitfalls. Candidates should also understand bus arbitration, error detection and recovery, interrupts and direct memory access interactions, integration with microcontroller peripheral drivers, hardware debugging techniques using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, and trade offs when selecting interfaces for latency, throughput, power, and complexity.
Analog To Digital and Digital To Analog Conversion
Basic understanding of ADC (Analog-to-Digital Converter): sampling, resolution, conversion time, multiplexing channels. DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) concepts. Understanding when and how to use these peripherals. Practical considerations like sampling rate, noise, and accuracy.
Bit Manipulation and Low Level Optimization
Covers understanding and applying bitwise operations and bit level techniques to solve algorithmic and systems problems. Topics include bit masking for isolating or setting fields, bit shifting for scaling and position manipulation, exclusive or tricks for swapping or parity, counting set bits, finding lowest or highest set bit, and using bitsets for compact state representation. Includes flag management and register style programming typical in embedded systems and hardware interfaces, as well as performance oriented techniques such as branchless programming and using processor population count instructions. Candidates should also be able to reason about when bit level approaches provide elegant or measurable improvements and when they become premature or harmful optimizations, and explain portability and endianness implications.
Embedded Systems Background and Motivation
Describe why embedded systems and hardware software integration interest you, citing specific domains such as IoT, real time control, or firmware development. Highlight relevant coursework, projects, toolchains, microcontroller or hardware platforms, and problems you solved such as low level optimization, power management, or device interfacing. Explain how your background prepared you to work on constrained systems and why the role and company match your technical interests and career goals. Include examples that show practical impact and cross disciplinary collaboration with electrical engineering or manufacturing.
Peripheral Interfacing and Hardware Abstraction
Basic understanding of common peripherals: ADC (Analog-to-Digital Converter), DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter), timers, PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation), UART, SPI, I2C, GPIO. Knowledge of how to interface with these peripherals using registers or hardware abstraction layers. Understanding of communication protocols at a basic level.
Device Drivers and Hardware Abstraction Layers
Covers design and implementation of device drivers and hardware abstraction layers for embedded systems. Topics include device driver architecture, register level programming, peripheral initialization, and the responsibilities of drivers such as configuration, interrupt handling, and data transfer. Compare interrupt driven and polling approaches and how to integrate direct memory access and buffering strategies for high throughput. Explore hardware abstraction layer design for portability and modularity across microcontroller families, layering strategies to separate hardware specific code from application logic, and the trade offs between abstraction and performance. Discuss integration with real time operating systems and driver frameworks, vendor supplied hardware abstraction libraries and when to adopt or extend them, and common peripheral examples such as universal asynchronous receiver transmitter, serial peripheral interface, inter integrated circuit, analog to digital converter, and general purpose input output. Include best practices for synchronization, concurrency, power management, testing and debugging drivers, API design between application and drivers, and maintainability considerations.
Bootloader Design and Firmware Initialization
Understanding bootloader responsibilities: hardware initialization, memory setup (stack, heap), runtime environment preparation (copying code to RAM if needed), jump to main application. Bootloader for firmware updates: handling multiple firmware images, verification before booting. Hardware-specific initialization: clocks, PLLs, memory controllers. Linker scripts and how memory layout affects execution. Bare-metal initialization without an OS.
Power Management and Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling
Understand power management techniques beyond just sleep modes. Discuss dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) where supported by hardware. Explain how to balance performance with power consumption. Discuss task scheduling that considers power implications. Understand implications of power mode transitions.