Trondheim - Norway

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B Knudsen Data

B Knudsen Data makes advanced software tools and designs embedded systems. Experience include cost-effective designs for volume production, low power consumption for battery operation, optimal combination of software and hardware. If you need to design competitive system solutions, then B Knudsen Data may have the right experience and capability.

Products:
  CC5X C compiler  for the PIC10/12/14/16 devices
  CC8E C compiler  for the PIC18 devices

The purpose of this story is to show the code savings experienced during redesign of a real system using the CC5X compiler. The application is a data acquisition system with many advanced and complex features like: programmable multi-channel data sampling, 128 kB RAM for storage using dynamic memory allocation, data compression, 32 bit calculations and more.

The original application filled 32 kB of code on a 8051, generated by a well known C compiler. It can be mentioned that later versions of the same compiler was able to reduce the code to 22 kB. However, the renewed and upward compatible system consisted of 5.5 kB code only (3220 instructions), using a PIC16C73. The code size difference is very large. The 8051 code contained many low level modules written in assembly. The CC5X compiler allowed all code to be written in C.

Two key success factors in this project was the efficiency of the CC5X C compiler and the PICmicro architecture.