A Design And Implementation Of Light Weight Bootloader (LWBL)

Traditional single-chip machine has been replaced by low-end32-bit microcontrollers. At present, these low-end embedded platforms are lack of a suitable Bootloader. Compare with single-chip machine, the performance and on-chip resources of low-end32-bit microcontroller have been greatly improved. As applications become more and more complex, the needs of Bootloader on these low-end embedded platforms become more and more urgent. This paper is intended to research and design a lightweight Bootloader (LWBL for short, same in below) for low-end embedded platforms. This Bootioader requires very little hardware and software resources to run. It can provide a variety of ways for firmware downloading. which provides a great deal of convenience and flexibility to the development and maintenance for embedded products. This Bootloader can enhance the reliability of embedded software update process, through a secure update mechanism to ensure the reliable update of the firmware. In particular, it can effectively prevent the embedded system from failing to start by update error, which will have a high practical value and can effectively reduce the embedded software development and maintenance costs. In addition, this Bootloader provides sevaral strict protection mechanisms for embedded software, such as firmware shell, firmware authentication mechanism combined with ChipID, to ensure that the embedded technology will not be easily stealed, protecting embedded developers’ fruits of labor.