Proceedings of the 11th international workshop on Software & compilers for embedded systems

Abstract

This volume contains the proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems (SCOPES 2008) held in Munich, Germany, on March 13th and 14th, 2008. One of the key characteristics of embedded software is that it heavily depends on the underlying hardware. Embedded processors are highly application specific, and embedded software thus needs to be designed such that it makes best use of a processor's features. As a consequence, embedded software design is directly related to an optimization process exploiting the characteristics of the underlying hardware under consideration of various cost functions like e. g. code size, energy consumption etc. SCOPES focuses on the software generation process for modern embedded systems. Topics of interest include all aspects of the compilation process, starting with suitable modeling and specification techniques and programming languages for embedded systems. The emphasis of the workshop lies on code generation techniques for embedded processors. The exploitation of specialized instruction set characteristics is as important as the development of new optimizations for embedded application domains. Cost criteria for the entire code generation and optimization process include runtime, timing predictability, energy dissipation, code size and others. Since today's embedded devices frequently consist of a multi-processor system-on-chip, the scope of this workshop is not limited to single-processor systems but in particular covers compilation techniques for MPSoC architectures. SCOPES 2008 is the 11th workshop in a series of workshops initially called "International Workshop on Code Generation for Embedded Processors". The name SCOPES has been used since the 4th workshop in 1999. Since then, SCOPES has been held in St. Goar, Germany in 2001; Berlin, Germany in 2002; Vienna, Austria in 2003; Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2004; Dallas, USA in 2005; Nice, France in 2007; and now in Munich, Germany. This year, SCOPES is held as a Friday Workshop of the European Design, Automation and Test conference (DATE). By bringing SCOPES and DATE together, SCOPES attracts a high degree of visibility, and the DATE conference as premier European design automation event explicitly emphasizes the importance of embedded software and compilers. In response to the call for papers, 22 very strong papers were submitted from all over the world. All submitted papers were reviewed by at least five experts to ensure the quality of the workshop. In the end, the program committee selected 8 papers for presentation at the workshop. These papers are divided into the following categories: "Optimization and code generation for embedded processors", "Memory- and addressing-aware compilation" and "Validation and simulation". In addition, we are proud that Koen De Bosschere agreed to give a keynote talk on "Memory footprint reduction for embedded systems" at SCOPES 2008.