Lightweight Multitasking Support for Embedded Systems using the Phantom Serializing Compiler

Embedded software continues to play an ever increasing role in the design of complex embedded applications. In part, the elevated level of abstraction provided by a high-level programming paradigm immensely facilitates a short design cycle, fewer errors, portability, and reuse. Serializing compilers have been proposed as an alternative to traditional OS techniques, enabling a designer to develop multitasking applications without the need of OS support. In this work, we outline the inner workings of the Phantom serializing compiler and analyze the quality of the generated code with respect to memory and processing overheads. Our results show that such serializing compilers are extremely efficient, making them ideal to be used in design of highly parallel applications (e.g., multimedia, graphics, and signal processing applications)

Synthesis of Time-Constrained Multitasking Embedded Software

In modern embedded systems, software development plays a vital role. Many key functions are being migrated to software, aiming at a shorter time to market and easier upgrades. Multitasking is increasingly common in embedded software, and many of these tasks incorporate real-time constraints. Although multitasking simplifies coding, it demands an operating system and imposes significant overhead on the system. The use of serializing compilers, such as the Phantom compiler, allows the synthesis of a monolithic code from a multitasking C application, eliminating the need for an operating system. In this article, we introduce the synthesis of multitasking applications that execute in a timely manner. We incorporate the notion of timing constraints into the Phantom compiler, and show that our approach is effective in meeting such constraints, allowing fine-grained concurrency among the tasks. As an additional case study, we present the implementation of a software-based modem and show that real-time applications such as the modem have guaranteed performance in the serialized code generated by the Phantom compiler

Interface-Centric Abstraction Level for Rapid Hardware/Software Integration

With the continuous advances of high-level synthesis and hardware/software codesign, engineers have now the luxury and the desire to explore very quickly multiple high-level architectures. Systemlevel tools can enable trade-offs of architectures that rely on different combinations of memory access, resource sharing and multiplexing. A good system-level design flow must enable fast and accurate viewing of multiple solutions based on different design choices. In this paper we present a system-level API for text-based specifications that combines transaction-level modeling for the hardware interface and OS and device drivers levels for the software interface into a unified semantics