CMSIS-SVD Repository and Parsers

What is this?

This repository seeks to provide value to developers targetting ARM platforms in two main ways:

Provide a convenient place to access and aggregate CMSIS-SVD hardware descriptions from multiple sources.
Provide parsers that make code generation and tooling based on SVD easier to build. Most parsers simply parse a provided SVD file and turn it into a data structure more easily used in that language.

What is CMSIS-SVD

ARM provides the following description of CMSIS-SVD (System View Description)

The CMSIS System View Description format(CMSIS-SVD) formalizes the description of the system contained in ARM Cortex-M processor-based microcontrollers, in particular, the memory mapped registers of peripherals. The detail contained in system view descriptions is comparable to the data in device reference manuals. The information ranges from high level functional descriptions of a peripheral all the way down to the definition and purpose of an individual bit field in a memory mapped register.

The original vision of ARM appears to have been to aggregate SVDs from various sources into a single repository accessible via ARM's CMSIS Website. Currently, however, this site fails to provide a comprehensive repository of CMSIS SVDs. The SVDs in this repository have been previously aggregated as part of the Eclipse Embedded Systems Register View plugin. This repo builds on the shoulders of the devlopers of EmbSysRegView and seeks to provide a repository of SVDs that is more accessible to a greater number of other projects.

How Can the CMSIS-SVD Be Used

The generic description of each MCUs CPU and hardware registers is very valuable when generating code that can be used for talking to specific target hardware. In fact, much of the code in parts of CMSIS itself are generated based of the SVD. ARM distributes an executable that does this transformation (SVDConvert.exe).

The information can also be used for building debug tooling, test infrastructure, or whatever else.

Contributing

Contributions from Silicon Vendors as well as community members are greatly appreciated. Please feel free to create an issue on Github and/or submit Pull Requests with proposed changes to the repository. These will be reviewed and pulled in if deemed appropriate.

License

The licensing for the contents of this repository is dependent on the directory in which files are located as well as the contents of the files themselves. If in doubt, the first parent directory of a file having license information is the license that applies. In all cases, if the file itself has a license specified, that applies.

In general, the following rules apply:

Under data, the license from each Vendor is provided along with the SVDs from that vendor. Please review this license before use of the SVDs contained therein. Look for files named the following for license information:
All other code is licensed under the terms of the Apache License v2.0 (See LICENSE-APACHE).