Analysis and design of unified hardware abstraction layer to support various multimedia SoC with android platform

Abstract

As the significant role of the software platform in the smart phone is now propagating beyond the mobile industry, the software platform is evolving to provide unified multi-screen service facilities over different types of devices such as digital TV and Set-Top Box (STB). However, the application-specific hardware architectures impose difficulties for providing unified software platform for heterogeneous devices. This paper analyzes the differences between mobile and TV/STB System-On-Chip (SoC) architecture and proposes a unified hardware abstraction layer (HAL) to support integration of the software platform on different devices. For the evaluation and demonstration of the proposed design, the unified HAL is applied to the mobile Android platform to implement multi-screen services.