Intel Keeps It Simple for IoT Firmware Developers

Firmware Engine boots up precertified code

by Bernard Cole - EETimes, Apr. 14, 2015 – 

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. -- At its Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China last week, it was clear that Intel is hoping to attract a new breed of Internet of Things developers: those from desktop/laptop, mobile/smartphone and enterprise platforms with few skills in developing the embedded firmware that these devices need. The company?s efforts center around the introduction of the company's Firmware Engine (Figure), the beta version of which was introduced with great fanfare.

Based on the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard, Firmware Engine is a GUI-based tool, hosted on a Microsoft Windows platform, that allows developers to quickly create binary firmware images based on Intel-certified UEFI code. These binaries can then be used by a developer to create the basic software needed to initialize platform hardware and launch operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Android, and Linux.

The UEFI standard defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware and replaces the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware interface used on early Intel- and Windows-based systems. As of Version 2.4 released in 2013, it now supports Intel's Itanium, x86, and x86-64 as well as Arm's AArch32 and AArch64. The Linux kernel is also able to use EFI at boot time.

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