Formal modeling of embedded systems with explicit schedules and routes

Abstract

A main goal of compilation is to efficiently map application programs onto execution platforms, while hiding the details of the latter to the programmer through high-level programming languages. Of course this is only feasible inside a certain range of constructs, and the judicious design of sequential programming languages and computer architectures that match one another has been a decades-long process. Now the advent of multicore processors brings radical changes to this topic, bringing forth concurrency as a key element in efficiency, both for application design and architecture computing power. The shift is mostly prompted by technological factors, namely the ability to cram several processors on a single chip, and the diminishing gains of Instruction Level Parallelism techniques used in former architectures. Still, the definition of high-level programming (and more generally, application design) formalisms matching the new era is a largely unsolved issue. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.