Automatic Firmware Generation for Spaceflight Hardware based on Schematics

The interaction between 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 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 that we demonstrate through a fault-injection analysis. Considering relevant cases, our tool detects 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…