Dealing with Hardware in Embedded Software: A General Framework Based on the Devil Language

摘要

Writing code that talks to hardware is a crucial part of any embedded project. Both productivity and quality are needed, but some flaws in the traditional development process make these requirements difficult to meet. We have recently introduced a new approach of dealing with hardware, based on the Devil language. Devil allows to write a high-level, formal definition of the programming interface of a peripheral circuit. A compiler automatically checks the consistency of a Devil specification, from which it generates the low-level, hardware-operating code. In our original framework, the generated code is dependent of the host architecture (CPU, buses, and bridges). Consequently, any variation in the hardware environment requires a specific tuning of the compiler. Considering the variability of embedded architectures, this is a serious drawback. In addition, this prevents from mixing different buses in the same circuit interface. In this paper, we remove those limitations by improving our framework in two ways. (i) We propose a better isolation between the Devil compiler and the host architecture. (ii) We introduce Trident, a language extension aimed at mapping one or several buses to each peripheral circuit.