Embedded C Standard Approaches

Sept. 30, 2002

Work on embedded extensions to C have been ongoing for years, but the ISO 18037 proposal (http://std.dkuug.dk) is now up for a vote. Acceptance is expected in 2003. ISO 18037 incorporates embedded C and DSP-C extensions that have been...

William G. Wong

Work on embedded extensions to C have been ongoing for years, but the ISO 18037 proposal (http://std.dkuug.dk) is now up for a vote. Acceptance is expected in 2003.

ISO 18037 incorporates embedded C and DSP-C extensions that have been proposed by a number of companies and organizations. Many companies, such as ACE Associated Compiler Experts (www.ace.nl) and Altium Technology's Tasking (www.tasking.com), have supported different aspects of the proposal in their compiler products.

The proposed standard addresses three main areas: fixed-point arithmetic, multiple address space support, and I/O register support. The fixed-point arithmetic is key to many DSPs. It's useful on many standard CPUs as well.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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