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 design errors, design portability, and Intellectual Property (IP) reuse. In a large class of embedded systems, dynamic multitasking using traditional OS techniques is infeasible because of memory and processing overheads or lack of operating systems availability for the target embedded processor. We propose a serializing compiler as an alternative solution to enable a designer to develop multitasking applications without the need of OS support. A serializing compiler is a source-to-source translator that takes a POSIX compliant multitasking C program as input and generates an equivalent, embedded processor independent, single-threaded ANSI C program, to be compiled using the embedded processor-specific tool chain. The output of our tool is a highly tuned ANSI C program that embodies the application-specific embedded scheduler and dynamic multitasking infrastructure along with the user code. In this work, we present the Phantom serializing compiler, discuss its architecture and scheduling technique, and show the feasibility of the proposed approach by comparing execution efficiency to solutions based on traditional OS implementations.