A Low-Overhead Framework for Inexpensive Embedded Control Systems

Embedded control systems are becoming more and more popular, especially in relatively inexpensive consumer products, like home appliances and building automation controllers. As a consequence, there is an ever increasing desire to reduce firmware development time and cost, without hampering reliability and performance. In this paper, a low-overhead firmware development framework is proposed, which allows programmers to develop and deploy typical real-time control software faster than using plain C-language programming. At the same time, experimental results confirm the framework's efficiency and applicability even to low-end microcontrollers.