Synchron - An API and Runtime for Embedded Systems
Paper i proceeding, 2022

Programming embedded systems applications involve writing concurrent, event-driven and timing-aware programs. Traditionally, such programs are written in low-level machine-oriented programming languages like C or Assembly. We present an alternative by introducing Synchron, an API that offers high-level abstractions to the programmer while supporting the low-level infrastructure in an associated runtime system and one-time-effort drivers.

Embedded systems applications exhibit the general characteristics of being (i) concurrent, (ii) I/O–bound and (iii) timing-aware. To address each of these concerns, the Synchron API consists of three components - (1) a Concurrent ML (CML) inspired message-passing concurrency model, (2) a message-passing–based I/O interface that translates between low-level interrupt based and memory-mapped peripherals, and (3) a timing operator, syncT, that marries CML’s sync operator with timing windows inspired from the TinyTimber kernel.

We implement the Synchron API as the bytecode instructions of a virtual machine called SynchronVM. SynchronVM hosts a Caml-inspired functional language as its frontend language, and the backend of the VM supports the STM32F4 and NRF52 microcontrollers, with RAM in the order of hundreds of kilobytes. We illustrate the expressiveness of the Synchron API by showing examples of expressing state machines commonly found in embedded systems. The timing functionality is demonstrated through a music programming exercise. Finally, we provide benchmarks on the response time, jitter rates, memory, and power usage of the SynchronVM.

runtime

virtual machine

real-time

concurrency

Functional Programming

Författare

Abhiroop Sarkar

Chalmers, Data- och informationsteknik, Funktionell programmering

Joel Svensson

Chalmers, Data- och informationsteknik, Funktionell programmering

Mary Sheeran

Chalmers, Data- och informationsteknik, Funktionell programmering

Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs

18688969 (ISSN)

Vol. 222 17:1-17:28 17
9783959772259 (ISBN)

36th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, ECOOP 2022
Berlin, Germany,

Octopi: Säker Programering för Sakernas Internet

Stiftelsen för Strategisk forskning (SSF) (RIT17-0023), 2018-03-01 -- 2023-02-28.

Ämneskategorier

Algebra och logik

Datavetenskap (datalogi)

Datorsystem

Styrkeområden

Informations- och kommunikationsteknik

DOI

10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2022.25

ISBN

9783959772259

Mer information

Senast uppdaterat

2022-08-02