About SCOPES 2007

The influence of embedded systems is constantly growing. Increasingly powerful and versatile devices are developed and put on the market at a fast pace. The number of features is increasing, and so are the constraints on the systems concerning size, performance, energy dissipation and timing predictability. Since most systems today use a processor to execute an application program rather than using dedicated hardware, the requirements can not be fulfilled by hardware architects alone: Hardware and software have to work together to meet the tight constraints put on modern devices.

One of the key characteristics of embedded software is that it heavily depends on the underlying hardware. The reason of the dependency is that embedded software needs to be designed in an application specific way. To reduce the system design cost, e.g. code size, energy consumption etc., embedded software needs to be optimized exploiting the characteristics of the underlying hardware.

SCOPES focuses on the software generation process for modern embedded systems. Topics of interest include all aspects of the compilation process, starting with suitable modeling and specification techniques and programming languages for embedded systems. The emphasis of the workshop lies on code generation techniques for embedded processors. The exploitation of specialized instruction set characteristics is as important as the development of new optimizations for embedded application domains. Cost criteria for the entire code generation and optimization process include runtime, timing predictability, energy dissipation, code size and others. Since today's embedded devices frequently consist of a multi-processor system-on-chip, the scope of this workshop is not limited to single-processor systems but particularly covers compilation techniques for MPSoC architectures.

In addition, this workshop intends to put a spotlight on the interactions between compilers and other components in the embedded system design process. This includes compiler support for e.g. architecture exploration during HW/SW codesign or interactions between operating systems and compilation techniques. Finally, techniques for compiler aided profiling, measurement, debugging and validation of embedded software are also covered by this workshop, because stability of embedded software is mandatory.

SCOPES 2007 is the 10th workshop in a series of workshops initially called "International Workshop on Code Generation for Embedded Processors". The name SCOPES has been used since the 4th workshop. The scope of the workshop remains software for embedded systems with emphasis on code generation (compilers) for embedded processors.