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EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems
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Removing Cycles in Esterel Programs

EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems volume 2007, Article number: 048979 (2007) Cite this article

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Abstract

Esterel belongs to the family of synchronous programming languages, which are affected by cyclic signal dependencies. This prohibits a static scheduling, limiting the choice of available compilation techniques for programs with such cycles. This work proposes an algorithm that, given a constructive synchronous Esterel program, performs a semantics-preserving source code level transformation that removes cyclic signal dependencies. The transformation is divided into two parts: detection of cycles and iterative resolution of these cycles. It is based on the replacement of cycle signals by a signal expression involving no other cycle signals, thereby breaking the cycle. This transformation of cyclic Esterel programs enables the use of efficient compilation techniques, which are only available for acyclic programs. Furthermore, experiments indicate that the code transformation can even improve code quality produced by compilers that can already handle cyclic programs.

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Olshausenstr. 40, Kiel, 24098, Germany
    • Jan Lukoschus
    •  & Reinhard von Hanxleden
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Correspondence to Jan Lukoschus.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Lukoschus, J., von Hanxleden, R. Removing Cycles in Esterel Programs. J Embedded Systems 2007, 048979 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/48979

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Keywords

  • Source Code
  • Programming Language
  • Control Structure
  • Signal Expression
  • Electronic Circuit