@ McGraw-Hill Education
• Embedded Firmware Design and
Development
– Embedded Firmware Design Approaches
• Super loop based approach
• Embedded Operating System based approach
– Embedded Firmware Development Languages
• Assembly Language
• High Level Language
1
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
✓The embedded firmware is responsible for controlling the
various peripherals of the embedded hardware and generating
response in accordance with the functional requirements of the
product.
✓The embedded firmware is usually stored in a permanent
memory (ROM) and it is non alterable by end users.
✓Designing Embedded firmware requires understanding of the
particular embedded product hardware, like various component
interfacing, memory map details, I/O port details, configuration
and register details of various hardware chips used and some
programming language (either low level Assembly Language or
High level language like C/C++ or a combination of the two).
2
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
✓The embedded firmware development process starts with
the conversion of the firmware requirements into a
program model using various modeling tools
✓There exist two basic approaches for the design and
implementation of embedded firmware, namely;
✓The Super loop based approach
✓The Embedded Operating System based approach
✓The decision on which approach needs to be adopted for
firmware development is purely dependent on the
complexity and system requirements
3
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Design Approaches – The Super
loop
✓ Suitable for applications that are not time critical and
where the response time is not so important (Embedded
systems where missing deadlines are acceptable)
✓ Very similar to a conventional procedural programming
where the code is executed task by task
✓ The tasks are executed in a never ending loop. The task
listed on top on the program code is executed first and the
tasks just below the top are executed after completing the
first task
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Design Approaches –
The Super loop
✓ A typical super loop implementation will look like:
1Configure the common parameters and perform
initialization for various hardware componentsvoid main ()
memory, registers etc. {
Configurations ();
2Start the first task and execute it Initializations ();
3Execute the second task while (1)
{
4Execute the next task Task 1 ();
5: Task 2 ();
//:
6: //:
Task n ();
7Execute the last defined task }
8Jump back to the first task and follow the same flow } 5
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Design Approaches – The Super loop
Pros:
✓Doesn’t require an Operating System for task scheduling and
monitoring and free from OS related overheads
✓Simple and straight forward design
✓Reduced memory footprint
Cons:
✓Non Real time in execution behavior (As the number of tasks
increases the frequency at which a task gets CPU time for
execution also increases)
✓Any issues in any task execution may affect the functioning of
the product (This can be effectively tackled by using Watch Dog
Timers for task execution monitoring)
6
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Design Approaches – The Super loop
Enhancements:
✓Combine Super loop based technique with interrupts
✓Execute the tasks (like keyboard handling) which
require Real time attention as Interrupt Service routines
7
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Design Approaches – Embedded
OS based Approach
✓ The embedded device contains an Embedded Operating
System which can be one of:
✓A Real Time Operating System (RTOS)
✓A Customized General Purpose Operating System
(GPOS)
✓ The Embedded OS is responsible for scheduling the
execution of user tasks and the allocation of system
resources among multiple tasks
✓ Involves lot of OS related overheads apart from
managing and executing user defined tasks 8
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Design Approaches – Embedded
OS based Approach
✓ Microsoft® Windows XP Embedded is an example of
GPOS for embedded devices
✓ Point of Sale (PoS) terminals, Gaming Stations, Tablet
PCs etc are examples of embedded devices running on
embedded GPOSs
✓ ‘Windows CE’, ‘Windows Mobile’,‘QNX’, ‘VxWorks’,
‘ThreadX’, ‘MicroC/OS-II’, ‘Embedded Linux’,
‘Symbian’ etc are examples of RTOSs employed in
Embedded Product development
✓ Mobile Phones, PDAs, Flight Control Systems etc are 9
examples of embedded devices that runs on RTOSs
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options
✓Assembly Language
✓High Level Language
✓Subset of C (Embedded C)
✓Subset of C++ (Embedded C++)
✓Any other high level language with supported Cross-compiler
✓Mix of Assembly & High level Language
✓Mixing High Level Language (Like C) with Assembly Code
✓Mixing Assembly code with High Level Language (Like C)
✓Inline Assembly
10
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options –
Assembly Language
✓ ‘Assembly Language’ is the human readable notation of
‘machine language’
✓ ‘machine language’ is a processor understandable language
✓ Machine language is a binary representation and it consists of 1s
and 0s
✓ Assembly language and machine languages are
processor/controller dependent
✓ An Assembly language program written for one
processor/controller family will not work with others
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@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options –
Assembly Language
✓ Assembly language programming is the process of writing
processor specific machine code in mnemonic form,
converting the mnemonics into actual processor instructions
(machine language) and associated data using an assembler
✓ The general format of an assembly language instruction is an
Opcode followed by Operands
✓ The Opcode tells the processor/controller what to do and the
Operands provide the data and information required to perform
the action specified by the opcode
✓ It is not necessary that all opcode should have Operands
following them. Some of the Opcode implicitly contains the
operand and in such situation no operand is required. The operand
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may be a single operand, dual operand or more
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options –
Assembly Language
The 8051 Assembly Instruction
MOV A, #30
Moves decimal value 30 to the 8051 Accumulator register. Here
MOV A is the Opcode and 30 is the operand (single operand). The
same instruction when written in machine language will look like
01110100 00011110
The first 8 bit binary value 01110100 represents the opcode MOV A
and the second 8 bit binary value 00011110 represents the
operand 30.
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@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options –
Assembly Language
✓ Assembly language instructions are written one per line
✓ A machine code program consists of a sequence of assembly
language instructions, where each statement contains a mnemonic
(Opcode + Operand)
✓ Each line of an assembly language program is split into four
fields as:
LABEL OPCODE OPERAND COMMENTS
14
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options –
Assembly Language
✓ LABEL is an optional field. A ‘LABEL’ is an identifier used
extensively in programs to reduce the reliance on programmers
for remembering where data or code is located. LABEL is
commonly used for representing
✓A memory location, address of a program, sub-routine, code
portion etc.
✓The maximum length of a label differs between assemblers.
Assemblers insist strict formats for labeling. Labels are always
suffixed by a colon and begin with a valid character. Labels can
contain number from 0 to 9 and special character _ (underscore).
15
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options – Assembly
Language
;##################################################################
##
; SUBROUTINE FOR GENERATING DELAY
; DELAY PARAMETR PASSED THROUGH REGISTER R1
; RETURN VALUE NONE
; REGISTERS USED: R0, R1
;##################################################################
## DELAY: MOV R0, #255 ; Load Register R0 with 255
DJNZ R1, DELAY ; Decrement R1 and loop till
R1= 0
RET ; Return to calling program
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@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options – Assembly
Language
✓The symbol ; represents the start of a comment.
Assembler ignores the text in a line after the ; symbol
while assembling the program
✓DELAY is a label for representing the start address of the
memory location where the piece of code is located in
code memory
✓The above piece of code can be executed by giving the
label DELAY as part of the instruction. E.g. LCALL
DELAY; LMP DELAY
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options – Assembly
Language – Source File to Hex File Translation
✓The Assembly language program written in assembly
code is saved as .asm (Assembly file) file or a .src
(source) file or a format supported by the assembler
✓Similar to ‘C’ and other high level language
programming, it is possible to have multiple source files
called modules in assembly language programming.
Each module is represented by a ‘.asm’ or ‘.src’ file or
the assembler supported file format similar to the ‘.c’
files in C programming
✓The software utility called ‘Assembler’ performs the
translation of assembly code to machine code 18
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options – Assembly
Language – Source File to Hex File Translation
✓The assemblers for different family of target machines
are different. A51 Macro Assembler from Keil software
is a popular assembler for the 8051 family micro
controller
✓Each source file can be assembled separately to
examine the syntax errors and incorrect assembly
instructions
✓Assembling of each source file generates a
corresponding object file. The object file does not
contain the absolute address of where the generated code
needs to be placed (a re-locatable code) on the program
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memory
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options – Assembly
Language – Source File to Hex File Translation
✓The software program called linker/locater is
responsible for assigning absolute address to object files
during the linking process
✓The Absolute object file created from the object files
corresponding to different source code modules contain
information about the address where each instruction
needs to be placed in code memory
✓A software utility called ‘Object to Hex file converter’
translates the absolute object file to corresponding hex
file (binary file)
20
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options – Assembly
Language – Source File to Hex File Translation
Assembly language to machine language Conversion process21
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options – Assembly
Language – Source File to Hex File Translation
Advantages:
✓Efficient Code Memory & Data Memory Usage (Memory
Optimization)
✓High Performance
✓Low level Hardware Access
✓Code Reverse Engineering
Drawbacks:
✓High Development time
✓Developer dependency
✓Non portable 22
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options
– High Level Language
✓ The embedded firmware is written in any high level
language like C, C++
✓ A software utility called ‘cross-compiler’ converts the
high level language to target processor specific machine
code
✓The cross-compilation of each module generates a
corresponding object file. The object file does not contain
the absolute address of where the generated code needs to
be placed (a re-locatable code) on the program memory 23
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options
– High Level Language
✓The software program called linker/locater is responsible
for assigning absolute address to object files during the
linking process
✓The Absolute object file created from the object files
corresponding to different source code modules contain
information about the address where each instruction
needs to be placed in code memory
✓A software utility called ‘Object to Hex file converter’
translates the absolute object file to corresponding hex file
(binary file)
24
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options – High Level
Language – Source File to Hex File Translation
Library Files
Source File 1
Module
(.c /.c++ etc) Object File 1
Cross-compiler
(Module-1)
Source File 2
Module
(.c /.c++ etc) Object File 2
Cross-compiler
(Module-2)
Object to Hex File Linker/
Absolute Object File
Converter Locator
Machine Code
(Hex File)
High level language to machine language
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Conversion process
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options – High Levely
Language – Source File to Hex File Translation
Advantages:
✓Reduced Development time
✓Developer independency
✓Portability
26
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options
– Mixing of Assembly Language with High Level
Language
✓ Certain situations in Embedded firmware development
may require the mixing of Assembly Language with
high level language or vice versa. Interrupt handling,
Source code is already available in high level
language\Assembly Language etc are examples
✓ High Level language and low level language can be
mixed in three different ways
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@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
Embedded firmware Development Languages/Options
– Mixing of Assembly Language with High Level
Language
✓Mixing Assembly Language with High level language
like ‘C’
✓Mixing High level language like ‘C’ with Assembly
Language
✓In line Assembly
✓ The passing of parameters and return values between the
high level and low level language is cross-compiler
specific 28
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
High Level Language – ‘C’ V/s Embedded C
✓ ‘C’ is a well structured, well defined and standardized general
purpose programming language with extensive bit manipulation
support
✓ ‘C’ offers a combination of the features of high level language
and assembly and helps in hardware access programming (system
level programming) as well as business package developments
(Application developments like pay roll systems, banking
applications etc)
✓ The conventional ‘C’ language follows ANSI standard and it
incorporates various library files for different operating systems
✓ A platform (Operating System) specific application, known as,
compiler is used for the conversion of programs written in ‘C’ to
the target processor (on which the OS is running) specific binary
29
files
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
High Level Language – ‘C’ V/s Embedded C
✓ Embedded C can be considered as a subset of conventional ‘C’
language
✓ Embedded C supports all ‘C’ instructions and incorporates a few
target processor specific functions/instructions
✓ The standard ANSI ‘C’ library implementation is always tailored
to the target processor/controller library files in Embedded C
✓ The implementation of target processor/controller specific
functions/instructions depends upon the processor/controller as
well as the supported cross-compiler for the particular Embedded
C language
✓ A software program called ‘Cross-compiler’ is used for the
conversion of programs written in Embedded C to target
processor/controller specific instructions 30
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Embedded Firmware Design & Development
High Level Language Based Development – ‘Compiler’ V/s
‘Cross-Compiler’
✓ Compiler is a software tool that converts a source code written in
a high level language on top of a particular operating system
running on a specific target processor architecture (E.g. Intel
x86/Pentium).
✓ The operating system, the compiler program and the application
making use of the source code run on the same target processor.
✓ The source code is converted to the target processor specific
machine instructions
✓ A native compiler generates machine code for the same machine
(processor) on which it is running.
✓ Cross compiler is the software tools used in cross-platform
development applications 31
@ McGraw-Hill Education
Embedded Firmware Design & Development
High Level Language Based Development – ‘Compiler’ V/s
‘Cross-Compiler’
✓ In cross-platform development, the compiler running on a
particular target processor/OS converts the source code to
machine code for a target processor whose architecture and
instruction set is different from the processor on which the
compiler is running or for an operating system which is different
from the current development environment OS
✓ Embedded system development is a typical example for cross-
platform development where embedded firmware is developed on
a machine with Intel/AMD or any other target processors and the
same is converted into machine code for any other target
processor architecture (E.g. 8051, PIC, ARM9 etc).
✓ Keil C51compiler from Keil software is an example for cross-
compiler for 8051 family architecture 32
