Automating Firmware Generation From Schematics for Microcontroller-Based Designs

The interaction of hardware design and firmware implementation requires strict consistency in embedded systems. Firmware must exactly match the schematic-level component configuration and connectivity. In current workflows, this consistency is largely ensured through manual inspection and extensive testing. In this work, we introduce a schematics-aware approach to automate firmware generation. We propose the Group Netlist, a design- and Printed Circuit Board (PCB) tool-agnostic abstraction of hardware. Using a reference implementation, we demonstrate our proposal for the Open-Source PCB design suite KiCad. As added benefit our approach serves for hardware verification purposes, which we demonstrate through a fault-injection analysis. Considering nonmechanical cases, our tool detects up to 75% of otherwise undetected injected faults and requires negligible overhead (less than 0.2% codebase addition and on average a 4.8% runtime increase). Lastly, we verify our tooling by successfully using it in the development workflow of an embedded satellite module.