Generic Hardware Description for Embedded Platforms

Abstract: On the area of microcontrollers, a firmware is traditionally built for a very specific hardware configuration. Without special design, there is little chance that the same firmware will run on several hardware platforms with a different sets of peripherals. But running the same firmware on different hardware configurations could have some benefits. It could allow a manufacturer or a sensor network manager to deploy the exact same firmware on all its nodes regardless of their hardware. It would greatly simplify the firmware management, and thus the update process. We know that such a system is possible on larger architectures, such as x86 or even ARM, but in this thesis we target smaller architectures. The typical target here is a sensor network node, running on a very low-power microcontroller. No generic system currently exists to allow a firmware to run on several hardware configurations of this type. In this thesis we present a new generic hardware description system that specifically targets small devices. This system can be integrated with existing frameworks or operating systems for embedded systems so that the firmware can adapt to the hardware it is running on. We show that it is possible by presenting a demonstration prototype using our hardware description system.