To increase the parallelisation and optimisation potential for multiprocessor targets, Belgium-based nanoelectronics and nanotechnology research centre IMEC has introduced a new programming style for C. It is called CleanC, with adherence analysis plug-ins freely available through Eclipse.

IMEC said it is developing multi-processor system-on-chip design tools to distribute applications over multiple processors while taking care of the synchronisation of the tasks and the exchange of data between tasks, with a mapping technology tool flow that consists of parallelisation and memory hierarchy optimisation tools.

To allow MPSoC design tools to unravel the intricacies of the application being analysed, IMEC explained that a number of restrictions are imposed on how the application is coded using the ANSI-C language, so that the input code will be written in CleanC, which is sequential C code written in a way that it is multiprocessor-friendly.

IMEC also said it is developing a code re-factoring toolbox to allow software developers to develop code that is suitable for parallelisation and mapping on multiprocessor platforms.

To make code able to be parallelized and mapped on multiprocessor platforms, the application code is first analysed with violations of the CleanC programming style flagged, for which CleanC adherence analysis plug-ins have been developed. Then, user-guided code transformations are applied to the code to make it compliant to the CleanC programming style and to optimise this process, IMEC said it is developing interactive re-factoring tools.

IMEC reminded that it provides its CleanC adherence analysis plug-ins to the industry without cost, which it believes allows for efficient analysis of code.

Specifically, the CleanC tool is a plug-in for the Eclipse/CDT development environment for C and C++ applications, which extracts and visualizes the function call graph, as well as allows for detection of fragments in sequential C code that are potentially hard to analyse by the MPSoC design tools and would lead to suboptimal solutions.

Rudy Lauwereins, VP of nomadic embedded systems at IMEC, concluded in a statement, "By offering the CleanC analysis plug-ins to industry for free, we want to introduce a standard coding style that makes the code analysable by multiprocessor parallelisation and mapping tools. Such a standard will provide a common platform for interoperability between EDA tools and application program code."

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor - Electronic News