Apparatus and method for annotating an intermediate representation of an application source code

A performance evaluation apparatus for annotating by priority level a DSP intermediate representation (DIR) of an application source code, the DIR including nodes, leaf nodes and heading nodes, wherein the heading nodes represent data ready operations, comprising:

• a host computer having processing circuitry, memory and a host compiler, the host compiler operative to execute the program using test sequences and generate dynamic information;
• a target digital signal processor (DSP) compiler communicating with the processing circuitry;
• and
• an annotation algorithm implemented on the host processing circuitry and operative to annotate application source code by giving priority to operations that allow more distant nodes to be scheduled earlier such that nodes with high priority levels are scheduled first, enabling extraction of target DSP pipeline parallelism.

A method of annotating a DSP Intermediate Representation (DIR) for a program source code, comprising:

• providing an application C source code;
• generating a DIR of the application C source code suitable to estimate a class of modified Harvard DSP architectures;
• calculating a priority level comprising a cycle-based distance between a node and a most distant leaf node of the DIR;
• and
• annotating each node of the DIR by the calculated priority level.