Bridge: a retargetable extensive profiling tool

The task of identifying an appropriate processor for a given class of applications to arduous and time consuming, requiring access to processors and extensive study of the processor architecture and organization. We describe Bridge, a retargetable profiling tool that attempts to ease the aforementioned task. Currently, Bridge is targeted to two microcontrollers: the Motorola 68HC11 and the MicroChip PIC16C64. In analyzing Quicksort and Heapsort routines it was found that the HC11 uses 2.7 and 6.8 times more execution cycles, respectively, than PIC. The resource utilization statistics were used to determine that the HC11 requires more additions for memory address generation. The PIC architecture, however, is limited to sorting 40 integers using Quicksort and 50 integers using Heapsort, due to use of 8-bit addresses. In contrast, the HC11 which uses 16 bit addresses, can be used to sort up to 3,000 integers.