Software engineering by itself is not enough for successful embedded systems. The designer and, ideally, the implementer, must know and understand the uniqueness of a stand-alone embedded system and the surrounding hardware devices. Many times we find highly limiting constraints such as memory shortage or limited hardware support and must deal with them to the best of our knowledge and experience. I have experienced many types of problems -- and found solutions -- as I worked on and headed up many firmware based projects. Some of these projects are:

• Integrated a smoke detector device into an existing fire alarm system.

• Developed and integrated a DSP based DTMF receiver controller board. Although the project was managed under serious time constraints, it was delivered on time and to the customer's full satisfaction.

• Designed, developed, integrated and tested downloadable firmware for a fax modem board. During the development process, I used a variety of software and hardware tools such as compilers, linkers, debuggers, in-circuit emulators, logic analyzers, scopes, etc.

• Managed maintenance of boot, configuration and diagnostics firmware for a large Real-Time system. This process involved coordinating between several teams and departments, understanding the needs of the application programmers and having a quick response time.

• Completed bootstrap loader for an embedded system.

• Completed a weighing system project, both hardware and software.

• Participated in a large missile control project. In that project, we faced severe memory shortage and growing demands from the customers: easy-to-use human interface, advanced digital filtering algorithms and many input/output devices. Our team managed to condense all the necessary functionality into the limited available memory.