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To prepare a USB stick (or other medium like a hard drive partition, or floppy disk), the firmware files or packages must be placed in either the root directory or a directory named /firmware of the file system on the medium. The recommended file system to use is FAT as that is most certain to be supported during the early stages of the installation.
Tarballs and zip files containing current packages for the most common firmware are available from:
• http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/firmware/
Just download the tarball or zip file for the correct release and unpack it to the file system on the medium.
If the firmware you need is not included in the tarball, you can also download specific firmware packages from the (non-free section of the) archive. The following overview should list most available
firmware packages but is not guaranteed to be complete and may also contain non-firmware packages:
• http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=firmware
It is also possible to copy individual firmware files to the medium. Loose firmware could be obtained for example from an already installed system or from a hardware vendor.