A small style nit: I am surprised that a journal like the CACM (not a general audience publication) would think that common acronyms like JTAG, UART, and FIFO need be spelled out at first use.

I’m not the journal’s editor, so perhaps it is appropriate to assume the audience will be unfamiliar with the terms. But in that case merely expanding the acronym is mostly useless (e.g. a JTAG port is an extremely low level debugging interface and knowing the name of the standards body doesn’t help explain that).