MCU

You’ve been told to port the firmware from one MCU to another. Maybe the chip went EOL. Maybe the shortage made it unavailable. Maybe the new product variant needs Bluetooth and your current MCU doesn’t have it. Whatever the reason, you’re staring at tens of thousands of lines of C that were written for one specific chip, and you need them running on a different one. This guide is the process I follow. It won’t make the port painless, but it’ll keep you from wasting time on the wrong things. ...

Between 2021 and 2024, I watched firmware teams go through the five stages of grief. Their chip was on a 52-week lead time. The drop-in replacement didn’t exist. And their entire codebase was welded to one vendor’s HAL. Now that lead times have mostly normalized, it’s tempting to forget. Don’t. The shortage exposed a structural weakness in how most teams write firmware, and the fix isn’t “keep more inventory.” It’s in how you architect your code. ...