10 Tips for designing a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)
Jacob Beningo
EDN (June 02, 2015)
Designing a HAL is a great first step to developing firmware that is reusable and hardware independent. No, a HAL is not the infamous artificial intelligence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The HAL, or Hardware Abstraction Layer, provides the application developer with a set of standard functions that can be used to access hardware functions without a detailed understanding of how the hardware works.
HALs are essentially API’s designed to interact with hardware. A properly designed HAL provides developers with many benefits, such as code that is portable, reusable, lower cost, abstracted, and with fewer bugs. A poorly designed HAL, though, can result in increased costs and buggy software, and leave the developer wishing that they were dealing with the previously mentioned infamous HAL. To make sure it's proper, here are 10 tips developers can follow when designing their own HAL.
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