Embedded software development on top of transaction-level models

Early embedded SW development with transaction-level models has been broadly promoted to improve SoC design productivity. But the proposed APIs only provide low-level read/write operations via a TLM interconnect. SW developers have to implement platform-specific communication procedures and handshake protocols to access HW functions, which requires a deep understanding of both the HW interfaces and the TLM fabric used. In this paper, we propose our concept of hardware procedure calls (HPC) with which HW services are provided to SW processes as remote methods on top of transaction-level communication. To this end, a lightweight HPC protocol is presented, and we propose a method to generate the infrastructure for HPC communication from a straightforward input description. Our experiments show that with HPC, embedded SW development is considerably made easier, and that also the effort to create the transaction-level model itself is reduced.