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M. Schoeberl, C. Thalinger, S. Korsholm, A. Ravn:
"Hardware Objects for Java";
Talk: The 11th IEEE Symposium on Object/Component/Service-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing, Orlando, Florida, USA; 2008-05-05 - 2008-05-07; in: "The 11th IEEE Symposium on Object/Component/Service-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing", IEEE Computer Society, (2008), ISBN: 978-0-7695-3132-8; 445 - 452.

Java, as a safe and platform independent language,
avoids access to low-level I/O devices or direct memory access.
In standard Java, low-level I/O it not a concern; it is
handled by the operating system.
However, in the embedded domain resources are scarce
and a Java virtual machine (JVM) without an underlying
middleware is an attractive architecture. When running the
JVM on bare metal, we need access to I/O devices from Java;
therefore we investigate a safe and efficient mechanism to
represent I/O devices as first class Java objects, where device
registers are represented by object fields. Access to those registers
is safe as Java´s type system regulates it. The access is
also fast as it is directly performed by the bytecodes getfield
and putfield.
Hardware objects thus provide an object-oriented abstraction
of low-level hardware devices. As a proof of concept,
we have implemented hardware objects in three quite
different JVMs: in the Java processor JOP, the JIT compiler
CACAO, and in the interpreting embedded JVM SimpleRTJ.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISORC.2008.63