Abstract: Embedded Technology has been used widely for the power system protection and monitoring devices. There is also an increasing complexity added to the embedded systems. The useful life of a product, is likely to be extended, and its user base increased, if it can be migrated to various platforms over its lifetime. It is seen that much of the development time is wasted in redeveloping the application software which can be saved if the applications built are platform independent. Developing a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) can ensure the much of the software reuse when ported across embedded hardware platforms having different architectures. The paper proposes the concept of HAL for two underlying Microcontroller platforms (16bit & 32bit architecture) targeting applications to power system protection. The paper discusses how a HAL is developed for the UART module of the two platforms.

Keywords: Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), UART, Application Program Interface (API), Middleware.