Towards direct execution of esterel programs on reactive processors

Esterel is a system-level language for the modelling, verification and synthesis of control dominated (reactive) embedded systems. Existing Esterel compilers generate intermediate C code that is subsequently mapped to a suitable target processor. The generated code emulates the reactive features of the language due to lack of support for these features on traditional processors. The resultant code is thus inefficient and bulky. Therefore, Esterel is not so effective for resource constrained embedded systems. This paper describes a reactive microcontroller called RePIC that has native support for reactive features of the language. Limited support for concurrent Esterel programs is demonstrated through a dual-processor RePIC architecture. A new benchmark suite for comparing the reactive performance of processors called the Auckland Reactive Benchmark (ARE-Bench) is used to demonstrate significant performance improvement and code compaction due to the proposed approach. This paper, thus, paves the way for resource constrained embedded system development using a subset of Esterel supported by RePIC like architectures.

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