Code-Size Reduction for Embedded Systems using Bytecode Translation Unit

Embedded microcontrollers are highly constrained in cost, power and area. Therefore it is important to reduce the microcontroller die area. This will increase the amount of die per wafer and eventually increases the die yield in the microcontroller production. In addition, decreasing the size of program memory, a major part of the embedded microcontroller, will also reduce the die area for on-chip memory. This work introduces a way to run small-sized programs in an embedded system using a combination of interpreter and stack-based intermediate codes, or also called bytecodes, which will reduce the program size. This paper is sectioned into 5 parts. Section 2, the fundamentals of code size reduction and its efficiency metrics are explained. The next section discusses the proposed technique. In Section 4, the experiments to measure the compression ratio and the result are shown. After the research summary in Section 5, the last section details the related work of code size reduction.