As embedded systems are getting more complex, they are also presenting more stringent constraints like performance, power consumption, memory footprint and so on. At the same time, because of market pressures, their development time must be constantly reduced. The employment of object orientation would solve the design cycle problem. However, OO languages like Java or C++ are not targeted to any of the embedded systems constraints stated before. Based on all these facts, this work focuses on providing the high OO abstraction, while maintaining embedded systems perspective. The methodology consists in the execution of selected objects in a reconfigurable hardware, which solves the overhead problems. This way, with efficient execution of certain intensively used objects in the reconfigurable array, we show performance improvements of up to 47 % and savings of 37 % in energy consumption, still taking advantage of the well known benefits of an object-oriented language. For our experiments we used a native Java processor, together with a complete MP3 player, representing a complex embedded system benchmark.
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