On the development of reactive systems
Logics and models of concurrent systems
A new method for compiling schizophrenic synchronous programs
CASES '01 Proceedings of the 2001 international conference on Compilers, architecture, and synthesis for embedded systems
Optimizations for Faster Execution of Esterel Programs
MEMOCODE '03 Proceedings of the First ACM and IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for Co-Design
An Esterel processor with full preemption support and its worst case reaction time analysis
Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Compilers, architectures and synthesis for embedded systems
REMIC: design of a reactive embedded microprocessor core
Proceedings of the 2005 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
A concurrent reactive Esterel processor based on multi-threading
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Mapping esterel onto a multi-threaded embedded processor
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Building timing predictable embedded systems
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)
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Esterel programs have traditionally been compiled to software code for general purpose processors or to hardware netlists. This paper, instead, proposes a reactive processor for the direct execution of Esterel. This intermediate approach offers the same flexibility as software compilation, while at the same time, providing much better code size and execution time. The proposed architecture, called STARPro, is a pipelined, multithreaded, reactive processor that provides native support for the direct execution of Esterel. STARPro manages Esterel threads and their scheduling, and also features a hardware preemption unit to assist the handling of the abort constructs in Esterel. In addition to the proposed architecture, we have also developed a new intermediate format called UCCFG"s"d (unrolled concurrent control-flow graph with surface and depth) to represent the structure of an Esterel program in our compiler. UCCFG"s"d closely resembles the Esterel source, and it has also been designed with Esterel hardware support in mind, allowing a straight forward translation into STARPro assembly instructions. We have compared the performance of STARPro against a recent reactive architecture and found an average of 37% speed-up in worst-case reaction times, and 38% in average-case reaction times.