An Executable Intermediate Representation for Retargetable Compilation and High-Level Code Optimization

Due to fast time-to-market and IP reuse requirements, an increasing amount of the functionality of embedded HW/SW systems is implemented in software. As a consequence, software programming languages like C play an important role in system specification, design, and validation. Besides many other advantages, the C language offers executable specifications, with clear semantics and high simulation speed. However, virtually any tool operating on C specifications has to convert C sources into some intermediate representation (IR), during which the executability is normally lost. In order to overcome this problem, this paper describes a novel IR format, called IR-C, for the use in C based design tools, which combines the simplicity of three address code with the executability of C. Besides the IR-C format and its generation from ANSI C, we also describe its applications in the areas of validation, retargetable compilation, and sourcelevel code optimization.