PORTING EPICS CORE PROGRAM ONTO MICRO-ITRON/SH4-BASED DEVICE CONTROLLERS

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) is widely used for many accelerator control systems. The most important component of EPICS is iocCore, which is the core software running on Input/Output Controllers (IOCs). In modern accelerator control systems, more and more intelligent controllers with an Ethernet interface, such as PLCs and custom device controllers, at the interface layer below VME single-board computers or PCs working as IOCs. However, in most cases, iocCore can run directly on the intelligent controllers themselves since they run a realtime kernel on a high performance CPU and tens of mega-bytes of memory. Running iocCore directly on the device controllers can reduce the depth of hierarchy in the system to make it simpler and more robust. As a first step towards this scheme, we have ported iocCore onto a target technical details of the porting are described.