Strategy in practice: Taking a hardware abstraction layer from design to deployment

Few industries suffer the budget and scheduling challenges caused by test instrument obsolescence as often and as severely as the military and aerospace industries. Often, the need for a given automated test system outlives the practical life of the original instruments as well as the expectation, interest, and even the availability of the original system developers. System readiness is increased when reliance on a specific model of hardware is reduced or removed completely. Hardware abstraction layers (HALs) are used in test systems to decouple the test application from the instrument hardware to minimize the time and cost associated with migrating or upgrading test systems. The material in this paper will provide practical guidance for user-defined-HAL-requirement gathering, design, development, and deployment. Key decisions within each phase are discussed, using a case study to provide an example of how one company applied this methodology and why.