Section: Application Domains

Compilers for Embedded Computing Systems

The previous sections described our main activities in terms of research directions, but also placed Compsys within the embedded computing systems domain, especially in Europe. We will therefore not come back here to the importance, for industry, of compilation and embedded computing systems design.

In terms of application domain, the embedded computing systems we considered are mostly used for multimedia: phones, TV sets, game platforms, etc. But, more than the final applications developed as programs, our main application has always been the computer itself: how the system is organized (architecture) and designed, how it is programmed (software), how programs are mapped to it (compilation and high-level synthesis).

The industry that can be impacted by our research is thus all the companies that develop embedded processors, hardware accelerators (programmable or not), embedded systems, and those (the same plus other) that need software tools to map applications to these platforms, i.e., that need to use or even develop programming languages, program optimization techniques, compilers, operating systems. Compsys did not focus on all these critical parts, but our activities were connected to them.