A Generic MCU Description Methodology with Dependency Evaluation

The widespread use of micro-controllers in the fields of education and application development have led to the need for a generic initialization code generator tool to aid tertiary students as well as developers. With this aim a generic description methodology for MCUs was developed by the authors of this paper. The description methodology bundled with a Java based MCU initialization code generator software was put to test using data from the H8S-2377 MCU. This paper presents a thorough analysis of the structural aspects of an MCU, the various features of MCU peripherals and initialization sequences to evaluate the completeness of the MCU description methodology. To this effect we identified the dependency problem whereby the setting for certain registers in an MCU is a mathematical function of other register settings. This feature of an MCU register, referred to as a dependency, is not supported by the current description methodology. As a result, the user has to manually calculate the function to initialize the dependent register. In this paper, we present a solution to the dependency problem by allowing users to enter the mathematical function in the MCU description, parsing the function in the code generator software to evaluate the dependency and subsequently assigning the calculated value to the dependent register in the initialization sequence.