A Hardware Abstraction Layer in Java

Martin Schoeberl, Stephan Korsholm, Tomas Kalibera, Anders Peter Ravn

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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Abstract

Embedded systems use specialized hardware devices to interact with their environment, and since they have to be dependable, it is attractive to use a modern, type-safe programming language like Java to develop programs for them. Standard Java, as a platform-independent language, delegates access to devices, direct memory access, and interrupt handling to some underlying operating system or kernel, but in the embedded systems domain resources are scarce and a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) without an underlying middleware is an attractive architecture. The contribution of this article is a proposal for Java packages with hardware objects and interrupt handlers that interface to such a JVM. We provide implementations of the proposal directly in hardware, as extensions of standard interpreters, and finally with an operating system middleware. The latter solution is mainly seen as a migration path allowing Java programs to coexist with legacy system components. An important aspect of the proposal is that it is compatible with the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ).
Keyword: Device driver,Embedded system,Java virtual machine,Java
Original languageEnglish
JournalA C M Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
Volume10
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)42:1-42:40
ISSN1539-9087
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes

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