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Hey, do you mind pointing me to some learning material regarding firmware? I have a totally unrelated background (I'm a chemist) although I picked up some codin

Hey, do you mind pointing me to some learning material regarding firmware? I have a totally unrelated background (I'm a chemist) although I picked up some coding during my PhD (the usual "science stack": Python/shell scripts). After that I learnt C and fell in love with its simplicity and power and firmware/drivers always seemed like magic to me so I'd like to understand them a little bit better. Thanks and have a great day!

Koshkin 5y ago
Not the GP, but to me the only difference between firmware and software is that firmware is often (but not always) "burned" right into a piece of hardware, which is usually a chip that has a microcontroller of some sort inside it. The PC BIOS is also called firmware sometimes - because it is "burned" into the PC itself. A device driver, on the other hand, can be implemented in software or firmware, or, usually these days, as a combination of both. Drivers indeed are magic - since they usually designed to interact with, and to control, physical systems, they must work in real time, and writing a driver requires understanding the system's behavior to a minute detail.