Systems Firmware is what adds functionality to hardware devices. In Firmware Development, engineers work close to the hardware on which their software runs. Because of this, Firmware Engineers tend to have more intimate knowledge of digital circuit design, hardware clock signals, timing diagrams, and a bunch of other hardware technologies.

The demand for Firmware Engineers/Developers is rapidly increasing due to the several applications of Internet of Things and M2M computing. It is of no surprise that finding outstanding firmware developers (people who have strong skills in firmware and hardware) is a quite challenging task to do.

Design for Test

• Every embedded system needs to be tested. In general, it is also mandatory for testing to be performed at several stages. The most common stages of testing are:

• System tests verifying that the product as a whole meet or exceeds the stated requirements. System tests are best developed outside of the engineering department, though they may fit into a test harness developed by engineers.

• Integration tests verifying that a subset of the subsystems identified in the architecture diagrams interacts as expected and produce reasonable outcomes. Integration tests are best developed by a testing group or person with software engineering skills.

• Unit tests verifying that individual software components identified at the intermediate design level perform as their implementers expect. That is, they test at the level of the public API the component presents to other components. Unit tests are best developed by the same people who write the code under test.

Embedded Firmware is the flash memory chip that stores specialized software running in a chip in an embedded device to control its functions. Firmware in embedded systems fills the same purpose as a ROM but can be updated more easily for better adaptability to conditions or interconnecting with additional equipment.

That is to say, firmware is typically written in a low level language (be it C or assembly), compiled and assembled into machine code, and placed in a known position on this storage, where the hardware, during its startup process can read from a known location, and begin executing that machine code.