Device Driver Development and Validation for ARM based SOC

Abstract

With the wide application of ARM technology, embedded microprocessors or eMPUs o er powerful processing cores. It can manage external memories as well as a wealth of peripherals, whilst remaining exible enough to serve a broad range of applications. To develop a real time application on a System on chip(SOC contains eMPU), it is important to include device driver interface as a part of it's embedded software. As real time application needs to complete it's task with help of kernel services and device driver interface. Device driver development requires more up-front planning than most application programming projects. At the very least it involves more testing and debugging, and requires more hardware knowledge. Unfortunately - but not surprisingly, de- vice driver development is more ine cient and time-consuming compared to other software development. With this motive we will represent the generic device driver architecture for ARM based SOC, to reduced development complexity. It also dis- cusses the methodology and constraints involved in the device driver development. These will be useful for the efficient and reliable device driver development. Finally, device driver validation frame work and debugging techniques have been explained, as a part of embedded software development.