In addition to the challenges of traditional software development for large systems, the developers of embedded systems have to face stringent resource constraints, high reliability requirements and competitive time-to-market conditions. Compilers play a major part in the construction of these software systems, directly influencing key performance parameters like quality, efficiency, code size, power consumption and lead time. This holds in particular for multi-media applications where parallelism is the only way to keep up with the real-time requirements of audio and video processing. Today, however, the most commonly used high-level programming language for embedded systems remains sequential in nature, calling for the use of advanced compilers to map sequential source code onto parallel processor architectures.
In this talk I will give an introduction to the TriMedia VLIW architecture that is the heart of the NXP digital media processing strategy. I will then discuss the challenges that need to be solved to enable application developers to write and maintain production quality consumer strength applications in C/C++ without resorting to assembly language.