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FIRMWARE is "software that is permanently embedded in hardware devices .Usualy is in ROM form .that means that is not MODIFIABLE that's why is FIRM-ly implanted . But is still software or coded INSTRUCTIONS ..
Is everywhere around ,the BIOS in computers is FIRMWARE .. the microcode in a CPU is firmware . There is a need to separate this pieces of code of a much more general notion of SOFTWARE .. so people don't make the mistake thinking that you can change it ,or modify it at will. Or it gets infected by viruses ..etc .!
when i worked on the ezusb (from cyperss) dev' bord,
thay have sopplayed what thay calld firmware that implements all the code for the usb bus........
and you would have to put youer code in spasipic place that thay told you to and youer code should not ever implement an infinite loop coz that would have crash there firmware.....
so baescly firmware thay way i see it is a program code that is bilt in or downloadd in to the micro in order to perform spachile peprpose.....
and somtime can be reconfigerd and modife in order to complay with your appliction.
Giving precise definition of firmware is difficult. Maybe firmware is something above the hardware and below general software. It can used to initiate the system when power up, it can set and read registers. For reconfigurable hardware system, it can modify datapath(coarse fine reconfigurable system) or reconfigure the whole hardware(like FPGA). From sofware perspective, it is too low level. From hardware, it is like hull interfacing software.
- Core software of an embedded system.
- Is not application software, meaning user cannot run firmware on an embedded system as he runs a SW on a PC.
- The code in your washing machine for example that defines the number of rinses, the amount of water and soap to take etc.
- Another example on Palm pilot there is a firmware part (the OS part) and apllication SW part. The Firmware part deals directly with the HW, controls CPU, memory, keypad, LCD, speaker, etc. The role of the Operating System is to present a layer for the application software to interface with these HW. (Don't make the same analogy for PC though!)
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