LCTES 2026

Welcome to the 27th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES 2026)!

LCTES provides a link between the programming languages and embedded systems engineering communities. Researchers and developers in these areas are addressing many similar problems but with different backgrounds and approaches. LCTES is intended to expose researchers and developers from either area to relevant work and interesting problems in the other area and provide a forum where they can interact.

LCTES 2026 is co-located with and shares the venue and activities with PLDI 2026.

The important dates are as follows:

Abstract Submission Deadline: March 6, 2026 (AoE)
Paper Submission Deadline: March 13, 2026 (AoE)
Paper Notification: April 17, 2026 (AoE)
Conference Dates: June 15–16, 2026

Call for Papers

Programming languages, compilers, and tools are important interfaces between embedded systems and emerging applications in the real world. Embedded systems are aggressively adapted for deep neural network applications, large language models, autonomous vehicles, robots, healthcare applications, etc. However, these emerging applications impose challenges that conflict with conventional design requirements and increase the complexity of embedded system designs. Furthermore, they exploit new hardware paradigms to scale up multicores (including GPUs and FPGAs) and distributed systems built from many cores. Therefore, programming languages, compilers, and tools are becoming more important to address these issues, such as productivity, validation, verification, maintainability, safety, and reliability for meeting both performance goals and resource constraints.

The 27th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, Tools and Theory of Embedded Systems (LCTES 2026) solicits papers presenting original work on programming languages, compilers, tools, theory, and architectures that help in overcoming these challenges. Research papers on innovative techniques are welcome, as well as experience papers on insights obtained by experimenting with real-world systems and applications. Papers can be submitted to https://lctes2026.hotcrp.com/.

Important Dates

Abstract Submission: March 6, 2026
Paper Submission: March 13, 2026
Paper Notification: April 17, 2026
Camera-Ready Submission: TBA
Conference Dates: June 15–16, 2026

Paper Categories

Full paper: 10 pages presenting original work. References and appendixes are not counted towards the page limit
Poster, work-in-progress and invited paper: 4 pages papers (incl. references/appendix) presenting original ideas that are likely to trigger interesting discussions.

Accepted papers in both categories will appear in the proceedings published by ACM. In addition, this year’s LCTES will have Distinguished Paper awards selected from this year’s accepted paper to recognize the outstanding work among all papers.

Topics

Original contributions are solicited on the topics of interest including, but not limited to:

Programming language challenges

Domain-specific languages
Features to exploit multicore, reconfigurable, and other emerging architectures
Features for distributed, adaptive, and real-time control embedded systems
Capabilities for specification, composition, and construction of embedded systems
Language features and techniques to enhance reliability, verifiability, and security
Virtual machines, concurrency, inter-processor synchronization, and memory management
Compiler challenges

Interaction between embedded architectures, operating systems, and compilers

Interpreters, binary translation, just-in-time compilation, and split compilation
Support for enhanced programmer productivity
Support for enhanced debugging, profiling, and exception/interrupt handling
Optimization for low power/energy, code/data size, and real-time performance
Parameterized and structural compiler design space exploration and auto-tuning
Tools for analysis, specification, design, and implementation, including:
Hardware, system software, application software, and their interfaces
Distributed real-time control, media players, and reconfigurable architectures
System integration and testing
Performance estimation, monitoring, and tuning
Run-time system support for embedded systems
Design space exploration tools
Support for system security and system-level reliability
Approaches for cross-layer system optimization
Theory and foundations of embedded systems

Predictability of resource behavior: energy, space, time

Validation and verification, in particular of concurrent and distributed systems
Formal foundations of model-based design as the basis for code generation, analysis, and verification
Mathematical foundations for embedded systems
Models of computations for embedded applications
Novel embedded architectures

Design and implementation of novel architectures

Workload analysis and performance evaluation
Architecture support for new language features, virtualization, compiler techniques, debugging tools
Architectural features to improve power/energy, code/data size, and predictability
Mobile systems and IoT

Operating systems for mobile and IoT devices

Compiler and software tools for mobile and IoT systems
Energy management for mobile and IoT devices
Memory and IO techniques for mobile and IoT devices

Large language models (LLMs) and programming languages/compilers

Impact of LLMs on embedded system design and architectures
LLM-based debugging tools for embedded software
Adapting LLMs for resource-constraint environment
LLM for embedded systems and compilers
LLM for program analysis, testing and verification.
Program analysis, testing and verification for LLM

Call for Artifacts

TBA

Submission

Submissions must be in ACM SIGPLAN subformat of the acmart format (available at and explained in more detail at https://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/). Each paper should be in 10pt font and have no more than 10 pages for full papers or 4 pages for work-in-progress papers. For full papers, there is no page limit on the page count for references or the appendix. The citations should be in numeric style, e.g., [52]. Submissions must be in PDF format and printable on US Letter and A4-sized paper. For papers in the work-in-progress category, add the suffix “(WIP)” to your title, such as “Title (WIP)”.

Format your submission with two-column ACM SIGPLAN article style (e.g. acmart LaTeX style with options sigplan,anonymous,review,10pt). You may exclude topmatter and ACM copyright notice for the submission:

\documentclass[sigplan, anonymous, review, 10pt]{acmart}
\acmConference[LCTES '26]{The 27th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, Tools and Theory of Embedded Systems}{June 2026}{Boulder, Colorado, United States}
\acmYear{2026}
\acmISBN{978-x-xxxx-xxxx-x/26/06}
\acmDOI{10.1145/xxxxxxx.xxxxxxx}
\copyrightyear{2026}
% For Review: Suppress the "ACM Reference Format" text block
\settopmatter{printacmref=false}
% For Review: Supress copyright notice for the reviewing
\setcopyright{none}

Double Blind Reviewing

To enable double-blind reviewing, submissions must adhere to two rules:

author names and their affiliations must be omitted; and,
references to related work by the authors should be in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …”).

However, nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult (e.g., important background references should not be omitted or anonymized). Papers must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere as discussed here. Authors of accepted papers will be required to sign an ACM copyright release.

ACM Publications Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.
Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start, and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE

All papers will be archived by the ACM Digital Library. Authors will have the option of including supplementary material with their paper. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library or the first day of the conference, which ever is sooner. Note that the date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

By submitting the paper, the authors agree that if the paper is accepted, one author will have to register at the conference rate and present the paper in person at the LCTES 2026 conference.

Submission site

https://lctes2026.hotcrp.com

Acknowledgments

This submission page is an adaptation and evolution of content from previous SIGPLAN conferences. We are grateful to prior organizers for their work, which is reused here.

This document is for those presenting a paper at LCTES ’26. If you’re presenting at PLDI, or PLDI tutorial/workshop, please see the Speaker’s Guide on the page for the corresponding conference/track.

Congratulations on having your paper accepted at LCTES ’26! This document will help ensure your presentation runs smoothly and has the best possible audience impact. Please read it in its entirety.

Checklist

Before LCTES:

Prepare and practice.
Each regular paper’s presentation slot lasts for 20 minutes, including 17 minutes of presentation and 3 minutes of Q&A.
Each WIP paper’s presentation slot lasts for 10 minutes, including 7 minutes of presentation and 3 minutes of Q&A.
Check the program to establish when and where your talk will be.
Ensure you have an HDMI adaptor for your device.

Before your talk:

Familiarize yourself with the room you will be speaking in.
Find and introduce yourself to your session chair.
Ensure that you are in the room no later than 5 minutes before your session.

After your talk:

Expect questions from the floor and the session chair.

Preparing Your Talk

Your work will have a greater impact if you’re well prepared.

It is very important that you run to schedule. The LCTES ’26 schedule is extremely tight, and thus session chairs have been asked to stick rigidly to the schedule.

Guidelines

Your talk should run for no more than the allocated time (i.e., 17 minutes for full papers, 7 minutes for WIP papers), uninterrupted. This gives you about three minutes for questions and speaker changeover.
Your talk should be prepared for the standard 16:9 widescreen ratio. If your talk is in a different ratio, at best it will be pillarboxed, wasting screen real estate and diminishing impact, and at worst, it won’t display correctly.
You will present your talk from a lectern, using a fixed lectern mic.
You will need to provide your talk ahead of time in either PDF or PowerPoint.

Advices

There are many excellent sources of advice on giving good talks, including from Simon Peyton Jones, Michael Hicks, Michael Ernst, and Derek Dreyer. Make good use of these!

Q&A

If you stick to the above schedule, you will have about 3 minutes for questions. The in-room audience will be able to ask questions via a queue at a single microphone on a mic stand in the center of the room.

It is good practice, as the speaker, to repeat your understanding of the question before providing your answer. This is particularly important when time is tight because it reduces opportunities for time being wasted on account of a misunderstanding.

Languages, Compilers, Tools and Theory of Embedded Systems (2026)LCTES 2026