Modern electronics is driven by the explosive growth of digital communications and multi-media technology. A basic challenge is to design first-time-right complex digital systems, that meet stringent constraints on performance and power dissipation. In order to combine this growing system complexity with an increasingly short time-to-market, new system design technologies are emerging based on the paradigm of embedded programmable processors. This concept introduces modularity, flexibility and re-use in the electronic system design process. However, its success will critically depend on the availability of efficient and reliable CAD tools to design, programme and verify the functionality of embedded processors. Recently, new research efforts emerged on the edge between software compilation and hardware synthesis, to develop high-quality code generation tools for embedded processors. This text provides a survey of these new developments. Although not limited to these targets, the main emphasis is on code generation for modern DSP processors.
Important themes covered by the book include: the scope of general purpose versus application-specific processors, machine code quality for embedded applications, retargetability of the code generation process, machine description formalisms, and code generation methodologies.