The aim is to help students develop understanding of hardware-software interaction through mechanisms of C programing language. Intention is to make students capable of developing software in C, independently and meticulously, with deeper understanding of their code.

After finishing this course it is expected that students will be able to design and implement industrial grade software of average complexity, using C language and for a variety of target platform.

Characteristics of software that directly relays on hardware. Software debugging and role of the processor simulator. More detailed knowledge of some elements of C programming language: size and representation of basic types; variable representation in hardware; memory allocation mechanisms; functions and calling convention; pointers and their relation to arrays; little and big endian; structures, unions and address alignment; build process and pre-processing. Revision control systems. Basic data structures that are frequently used in special purpose real-time systems. Special C language extensions: standard extension and compiler specific. Safety and reliability related topics: testing procedures, MISRA (and similar) rules and static code analysis.

Lectures. Computer labs. Office hours. Pre-exam obligations include a student project. Final exam covers theoretical knowledge.