The Design And Implementation Of Runtime Firmware Upadte For Power Management Base On UEFI EDKⅡ

Mobile terminals,such as smartphones and tablet computers,are becoming more and more popular with the development of technology.As the main component of the mobile terminal,the power management IC(PMIC)plays an important role in the mobile terminal.However,due to the need for system power optimization and functional upgrading,the upgrade of PMIC firmware is an inevitable process in the development and production of mobile terminals.The PMIC firmware is usually upgraded by used of external JTAG hardware programming equipment.In this paper,PMIC and UEFI EDKⅡ are the research objects.The internal structure of PMIC and the storage characteristics of NVM are studied,the software development environment of UEFI EDKⅡ is also studied,the design of firmware upgrades is proposed,the innovation of firmware upgrading method from hardware to software has been realized.So as to improve the efficiency of firmware upgrading and reduce the development cost and industrial production cost of the mobile terminal.The research results of this paper are as follows.1.Two interface specifications,which is UEFI and PI,and the edkii development environment for implementing these two specifications are studied.The UEFI specification defines the interface between the operating system and the platform firmware,and the PI specification establishes the internal architecture in firmware and interfaces between the hardware platform and firmware.As a modern,feature-rich,cross-platform UEFI firmware development environment,EDKⅡ has been widely used in the industry.2.The internal structure of PMIC and the interface between the PMIC and the whole system are studied.The storage characteristics such as 2K bytes one time programming(OTP)area is studied,and firmware structure of PMIC firmware is also studied in order to construct a test firmware.3.After researching each stage of UEFI,the device support of PMIC is realized in each phase of UEFI startup,and the UEFI application of PMIC firmware upgrade is realized.Then the real-time PMIC firmware upgrade in INTEL Atom platform through repeated tests in reading and writing with the test firmware.Eventually,the methodology of PMIC firmware real-time upgrade provides convenience for the development and production of smart phones and platform computers,and it reduces costs as well.