Formal Modeling of Embedded Systems with Explicit Schedules and Routes
Abstract
A main goal of compilation is to efficiently map application programs onto architectural 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 decadeslong 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.