A real-time virtual machine implementation for small microcontrollers

A way to host a full general purpose virtual machine (VM) interpreter on a very small microcontroller platform is described. This machine provides a comprehensive set of general and enhanced functionality efficiently by abstracting the VM instruction set. Measurements were made on the execution of software programs in the virtual machine while running on the target platform in order to demonstrate the machine’s capabilities. Additionally, multitasking capabilities were added to the baseline and found to perform efficiently within the VM. The results proved to be satisfactory and demonstrate that a robust virtual machine can be made available for very small embedded platforms based on simple microcontrollers, such as those that are widely found in aerospace applications.