5.13 Summary

The program is a very fundamental unit of embedded system design and it usually contains tightly interacting code. Because we care about more than just functionality, we need to understand how programs are created. Because today’s compilers do not take directives such as “compile this to run in less than 1 microsecond,” we have to be able to optimize programs ourselves for speed, power, and space. Our earlier understanding of computer architecture is critical to our ability to perform these optimizations. We also need to test programs to make sure they do what we want. Some of our testing techniques can also be useful in exercising the programs for performance optimization.