Conclusions

The need for higher productivity in embedded system design demands for taking the step from assembly to C level programming of embedded processors. While compiler technology is relatively mature for general-purpose processors, this generally is not the case for embedded processors. The reason is that embedded systems require higher code efficiency than general-purpose systems. Simultaneously, recent embedded processors show specialized architectural features that cannot be well exploited with standard compiler techniques. However, C compilers for embedded processors will only gain more acceptance in industry, if their code quality overhead is low as compared to assembly code. The key concept to overcome these problems is the development of new compiler techniques that take the special constraints in embedded system design into account.