Ricoh licenses Vayavya's DDGen tool for automated device driver generation

Bangalore, India Kanagawa, Japan – June 5, 2013

Ricoh Company Ltd., a global leader in imaging devices and industry products, announced that they have entered a licensing agreement with Vayavya Labs Pvt. Ltd. for using DDGen to accelerate development of device drivers.

DDGen generates device drivers for different operating systems from a formal specification of the peripheral's programming specification.

Ricoh will be using DDGen for different peripherals present in their products - including USB host/device controllers, network controller, flash memory devices, etc.

The licensing engagement follows a positive recommendation from an earlier study by Ricoh that looked into various aspects of the DDGen methodology - including quality of the generated code.

Naoya Morita, Embedded Platform Development Department at Ricoh Company Ltd., said, “As a system provider, we would like to have every IP be ready to be incorporated into the systems.

“In order to establish such state, it is essential to have a tool like DDGen, which enables us to automatically generate device drivers based on data such as IP-XACT (with extensions), and to manage all IPs with IP-XACT.

“We have been searching some tools like DDGen to cut down cost, time and effort while meeting the time-to-market demands. We are encouraged by the early results shown by DDGen.”

RK Patil, Vayavya Labs CEO said, “As programmable IPs in Systems on Chip (SoC) design increase in numbers and complexity, the delivery of embedded software as part of the system becomes a bottleneck.

With proliferation of multiple embedded operating systems, SoC firms face the challenge of delivery for device drivers and multiple BSPs. An automation tool like DDGen can help in bringing up to 10-fold productivity improvements for device drivers and BSP. We are happy to see a major embedded platform firm Ricoh endorsing the benefits.”

Notes to the Editor:

What is adevice driver and its relevance

A driver is a small piece of software that tells the operating system and other software how to communicate with a piece of hardware.

For example, all printers come accompanied with drivers to install that tell the operating system exactly how to print information on the page.

Sound card drivers tell software exactly how to translate data into audio signals that the card can output to a set of speakers. The same applies to video cards, keyboards, monitors, etc.

With proliferation of chips (SoCs) in everyday life we all make use of device drivers knowingly or unknowingly. Take example of every application on your mobile, tablet, your interaction with TV, Set top Box, Your smart car where you have ABS, MP3 players, auto climate adjustments, a refrigerator at home with intelligent cooling system.

Al these are controlled by some form of electronics coupled with sensors and a central computing engine called SoC or Micro-controller.  The SoC/ Micro-controller has an application software and a embedded software which controls the hardware and input/output.

To control any hardware and input-output dedicated software (called device driver) is present.  Today most of drivers are written manually by engineers who should have the knowledge of hardware (its functionality) and the application software requirements. Needless to say this is skilled job, prone to errors and time consuming.  All semiconductor companies and product design firms across world spend billions of dollars every year in getting these drivers developed and maintained (remember the BLUE DEATH screen in Windows?... most of the time it is caused by a faulty software component called DRIVER!)

Vayavya Labs is bringing a technology and tool which can help in automation of drivers.

System on Chip (SoC) Traditionally, Semi Conductors were designed to handle one application on a single chip. System on Chip (SoC) includes an entire system on a single chip. For example, most modern day televisions could have System on Chip compared to 10-12 different semi conductor components.

IP-XACT isan industry standard for creating specifications for Semi Conductors and is part of a wider industry standards body Accellera, and an offshoot of IEEE.

IPs: Intellectual Property

BSP: Board Support Package