Marcel Beemster, Hans van Someren and Willem Wakker
ACE Associated Compiler Experts

Embedded C is a language extension to C that is the subject the ISO technical report "Extensions for the programming language C to support embedded processors" [3]. It aims to provide portability and access to common performance increasing features of processors used in the domain of DSP and embedded processing. Embedded C adds fixed-point data types, named address spaces and hardware I/O to C. Fixed-point primitives and named address spaces are performance increasing features. They are motivated by a practical and economic need to program DSP processors in a high level language instead of assembly. The focus of this paper is on the performance improving features of Embedded C.