Big Tech
Which company invented the JTAG standard for debugging embedded systems?
Texas Instruments — Developed JTAG (IEEE 1149.1) in 1985.
The A in ARM processors orignally stood for this
What is Acorn RISC Machine
(Later renamed Advanced RISC Machines, now in over 95% of smartphones)
How many unique 7-bit addresses are theoretically available on an I²C bus
128 addresses (0–127), though some are reserved for special functions.
The unofficial “Hello World” of embedded programming?
The blinky LED program
The Y2K bug? (2000)
They used two-digit years (e.g., “99”), so “00” was read as 1900.
Which company manufactures the Raspberry Pi series of single-board computers?
Who is Raspberry Pi Foundation?
(A UK charity promoting computer science education.)
“PIC” in PIC microcontroller?
Peripheral Interface Controller — Developed by Microchip Technology.
What is the purpose of the parity bit in UART communication?
To detect single-bit errors during transmission.
This common and gross hex value is used for filling unused memory in a processor
0xDEADBEEF
This caused Toyota to faced lawsuits over sudden unintended acceleration. (2000s)
Stack overflow and task scheduling flaws in the ECU firmware.
Before it was acquired by Microchip, which company originally developed the AVR architecture used in many Arduinos?
Atmel — Acquired by Microchip Technology in 2016.
The X POSIX stands for this
Portable Operating System Interface (for UNIX)
This type of UART handshake signal indicates that the peripheral is ready to accept more data.
CTS (Clear to Send)
Mutexes, semaphores and atomic access solves this fast paced corruption
A race condition
This infamous consumer device once got “bricked” due to a bad bootloader update?
The Xbox 360, among others — bricked consoles became a meme.
Which consumer electronics company once made oscilloscopes and other test equipment before pivoting to personal computers?
Hewlett-Packard (HP) — Started with test equipment before moving into computers.
VCO
(Block that can generate a frequency proportional to a control voltage)
Voltage-Controlled Oscillator
This SPI extension allows multiple devices to communicate with the same bus at high speed, using separate chip-select lines and multiple data lines.
Quad-SPI (QSPI) or Octal-SPI?
Use this keyword to declare a localized global variable
Static
The Intel Pentium floating-point division bug was caused by this, which produced wrong answers for certain divisions. (1994)
Missing entries in a lookup table used for division.
This protocol, originally created by Bosch in the 1980s, is widely used in automotive ECUs for reliable, real-time communication.
CAN (Controller Area Network)
These 3 companies created the AIM alliance jointly to developed the PowerPC architecture in the early 1990s
Apple, IBM, and Motorola — The AIM alliance created PowerPC.
On early PCs, pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del didn’t reboot the OS directly. What did it actually trigger at the hardware level to cause the which the BIOS recognized as a reset?
a keyboard controller interrupt, which the BIOS interpreted as a reset signal.
In a real-time OS, this is when a lower-priority task hogs the CPU without yielding
Priority inversion
This bug caused NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter to burn up in the Martian atmosphere instead of entering orbit properly (1999)
One team used imperial units (pound-force), another used metric (newtons). The mismatch wasn’t caught in software.