Integrating Static Program Analysis Tools for Verifying Cautions of Microcontroller

Abstract

Microcontrollers are usually supplied with hardware manuals, where information that requires special attention is emphasized as cautions. Currently, the process of verifying these cautions is performed manually as there is no single tool that can directly handle this task. This research aims at automating the verification process for these cautions as much as possible. Firstly, we investigate two sections which have a considerable number of required cautions in the hardware manual of a popular microcontroller to obtain the typical cautions of microcontrollers. Secondly, we analyze and categorize these cautions into several groups. Subsequently, we propose a semi-automatic approach which uses the assertion-based method and integrates two existing static program analysis tools (i.e., Cobra and Eva plugin of Frama-C) to verify the cautions. To show the applicability of this approach, we conduct two experiments with a benchmark source code and an industrial source code provided by Aisin comCruise Co., Ltd.. The results show that this approach is capable of detecting all violations in the benchmark program and only misses one expected violation in the industrial project.