Top 10 Reasons Why You Need a Custom BIOS
Many times a minor tweak to the BIOS of a single board computer or embedded motherboard can greatly enhance the industrial computer system user experience. The BIOS customization can be relatively simple such as adding a customer’s company logo to the system start-up screen or as complex as re-ordering a system’s boot priority to match a customer’s unique system start-up requirements.
Either way, you want to ensure that the system integrator you work with understands both your system sub-component configuration needs as well as how the BIOS of the SBC or motherboard can be optimized to get the most our of your industrial computer system investment. As an embedded board designer and system integrator, Trenton has many years of experience in meeting different custom BIOS requests. What follows is a list of the nine most common BIOS customizations, with number ten reserved for you.
- Change Standard Defaults – From changing processor operational parameters to device interface types, this is our most common custom BIOS request and one of the simplest to implement. The payback can be enormous in terms of simplifying the end user system deployment process.
- Embed Company Logo – Another common request is to add the customer’s company logo to the BIOS start-up screen, ideal for creating a branded solution.
- Increase Device Bus Capacity – For customers with a lot of I/O cards in their system, this custom BIOS change can be a lifesaver in terms of preventing unnecessary hardware expenditures.
- Match Specific IRQs – Sometimes certain system components must reside in precise system locations within memory. Changing the IRQ to match the needs of the system sub-component can save hours of trouble shooting and work around headaches.
- Custom Retry Logic – Sometimes a specific combination of I/O cards requires changes in the BIOS retry logic. A BIOS change like this can prevent system lock ups during data traffic bursts along the system’s I/O communication interface bus.
- Adding booting delays – Legacy peripheral I/O cards sometimes have problems booting in a system with the latest multi-core processors. This custom BIOS change enables the cards to boot in the correct sequence and save the costs of re-engineering in a new card that may not meet all of the customer’s long established system requirements.
- Change Reset Pulses – Adding extra reset pulses within the BIOS sometimes enables a customer to prevent having to change an I/O card model type due to system initialization issues.
- Modifying Memory or I/O Resource Requests – Frankly I/O cards do weird things when requesting system memory or I/O resources. Oftentimes the requests make no sense and cause system misbehavior that can be eliminated by making a BIOS change that ignores unnecessary resource requests.
- Changing Boot Priority – Some customer systems require a specific boot priority in the event that the bootable device configuration is changed. This is a simple way to meet these requirements without incurring undue re-engineering expenses.
- Now it’s your turn… fill in #10 with your own custom BIOS requirement.
About the Author
Jim Renehan is the Director of Marketing for Trenton Technology. Jim has held various marketing and application engineering positions in the embedded computing, industrial automation, and automatic identification industries. Jim holds a BS in Industrial Technology from Iowa State University of Science and Technology in Ames, Iowa. For further information, please visit Trenton Technology.
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