On Hardware and Hardware Models for Embedded Real-Time Systems Jakob Engblom∗ Dept. of Information Technology, Uppsala University P.O. Box 325, SE-751 05 Uppsala, Sweden
[email protected] / http://www.docs.uu.se/~jakob effects if deadlines are missed or some other timing- Abstract related bugs manifest themselves. When developing embedded real-time systems, de- When building an embedded real-time systems, the signers and programmers rely on various forms of choice of hardware platform is very important to create scheduling and timing analysis. At some point, all an analyzable and predictable system. Also, the quality such analyses must account for the hardware used to of the models of the hardware used in software tools obtain execution time information, and if the analysis is very important to the correctness of timing analysis method does not accurately reflect the hardware char- and the integrity of the system. acteristics, the result is likely to be a bad analysis and In this paper, we discuss some of the aspects of how potentially a bad system. to build hardware models that are correct visavi the The choice of hardware, specifically the microproces- hardware, and how to select hardware that allows real- sor or microcontroller to use, has a profound influence time systems to be constructed in a reliable fashion. on the analyzability of a system. The timing behav- The purpose of this paper is to inspire some discus- ior of a complex CPU core is very hard to understand sion regarding how real-time systems are designed and (even without a cached memory system).