Hardware Interfaces and Protocols Questions

Practical knowledge of embedded hardware interfaces and low level communication buses used to connect sensors, actuators, and peripheral devices to microcontrollers and processors. Topics include Inter Integrated Circuit (I2C), Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART), Controller Area Network (CAN) bus and their timing, framing, clocking, and electrical characteristics; general purpose input output (GPIO) and analog input and output including analog to digital and digital to analog conversion; signal integrity, pull ups and pull downs, level shifting, termination, and common electrical pitfalls. Candidates should also understand bus arbitration, error detection and recovery, interrupts and direct memory access interactions, integration with microcontroller peripheral drivers, hardware debugging techniques using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, and trade offs when selecting interfaces for latency, throughput, power, and complexity.