Embedded Systems & Hardware Topics
Covers chip design, System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture, custom silicon strategies, hardware accelerators, IP development, and the integration of silicon design with software ecosystems.
Peripheral Interfaces and Serial Communication Protocols
Wiring firmware to hardware through digital and serial buses such as GPIO, I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, and USB. Covers protocol framing, addressing, clocking, bus arbitration, and driver-level integration with peripheral registers. Includes debugging bus-level communication failures and choosing the right interface for a device.
Hardware Security and Cryptographic Integration
Protecting embedded systems at the silicon and firmware boundary and integrating cryptography where it meets hardware. Covers secure boot, secure enclaves and trusted execution environments, hardware roots of trust, key storage, and tamper resistance, as well as hardware crypto accelerators, secure elements and HSMs, true random number generation, and constant-time and side-channel-resistant implementation on constrained devices. Frames how hardware-backed isolation defends against physical and firmware-level attacks and how cryptographic requirements interact with the hardware that enforces them.
Hardware/Software Co-Design and Resource Constraints
Building firmware within the memory, compute, and I/O limits of embedded hardware, and deciding what to implement in hardware versus software. Covers partitioning of functionality, memory-mapped I/O, register-level control, and optimizing for constrained RAM, flash, and cycles. Frames the negotiation between hardware capabilities and software requirements.