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Electrical & Electronics Engineering vocabulary · Digital Electronics and Microcontrollers

Firmware

Meaning in electrical & electronics engineering, with examples

/ˈfɝmˌwɛr/nounCore term

In electrical & electronics engineering, firmware means: Software stored in a device's non-volatile memory that controls its hardware directly, such as the program running on a microcontroller.

In Turkish: gömülü yazılım, firmware, bellenim

How it is used

Used in embedded systems and product support. Engineers write, build, flash and update firmware, and talk about firmware versions, firmware bugs and over-the-air (OTA) updates. 'Flash the firmware' means loading it into the device's flash memory.

Example sentences

  1. Which firmware version is on the units that failed in the field?

  2. After the firmware update, the sensor readings are stable again.

Common collocations

  • firmware update
  • firmware version
  • flash the firmware
  • embedded firmware
  • OTA update
  • microcontrollerA small computer on a single chip, with a processor, memory and input/output peripherals. It runs firmware to control devices such as appliances, sensors and motors.
  • GPIOShort for general-purpose input/output: a microcontroller pin that firmware can set as an input to read a logic level or as an output to drive something.
  • UARTShort for universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter: a hardware block that sends and receives serial data over two lines, TX and RX, without a shared clock.
  • PWMShort for pulse-width modulation: switching a signal on and off quickly and changing how long it stays on in each cycle (the duty cycle) to control the average power.

More terms: Digital Electronics and Microcontrollers

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