Niels Gandraß: Towards a Clean-slate Timer-API for RIOT-OS

Hardware timers are peripherals found in every embedded system. While being required by nearly all applications running on MCUs, current timer drivers often leave potential for efficiency optimizations, especially when used in low-power scenarios. With the goal of developing an optimized timer-API for RIOT-OS, an open-source embedded OS for resource constrained devices in the Internet of Things, our contribution is twofold. First, we illustrate various approaches to hardware timer usage as well as related research in this field. Second, we conduct a multi-manufacturer and inter-MCU-family analysis of the available timer peripherals and present our results in a comparative fashion. We give detailed insight into similarities and differences of hardware timer peripherals currently supported by RIOT-OS. Both the reviewing of related work and the conducted hardware analysis shall provide a baseline to later derive requirements and deduce applicable implementation techniques for a clean-slate timer-API from.

Slides