Writing Hardware Drivers in Simulink -- Good Idea?

Hey all, I was hoping to get some feedback on a design philosophy that may or may not be a good idea. For context, I'm an embedded software engineer who's new to Simulink but fairly experienced with writing hardware drivers in C/C++.

I've got a large new project at work (bare metal) that is taking a model based design approach and one engineer (very experienced with Simulink), is advocating strongly for writing the HW drivers in Simulink. I've messed around with embedded coder a little bit and see how that could be possible, but my question is: Is this a good idea?

The argument is that by doing everything in Simulink we can take full advantage of the analysis tools built into the product to increase our confidence level in the software correctness, which is actually a very important thing we need in this project. I like the idea of that, however I haven't seen many references elsewhere on the internet where this is done.

Answer 1

[Yash]

Hi @Brandon, you can try going through these resources to take a call on writing hardware drivers in Simulink:

• Device Drivers: Integrating existing C (or C++) device driver functions into Simulink models by using the Legacy Code Tool. This will allow you to combine usage of C/C++ and Simulink.
• Simulink Device Drivers: Step-by-step guide and examples for developing Simulink Device Driver Blocks.
• Development of Hardware Driver for MATLAB/Simulink Real-Time Simulation: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5072832
• Writing A Simulink Device Driver Block: A Step by Step Guide: https://www.scribd.com/document/456195737/DriverGuide
• Device Driver Blocks: Specialized MATLAB System block that generates custom C/C++ device driver code when deployed to an ARM® Cortex®-A derived hardware board.

[Brandon]

Thanks for the links, these are informative.