Emulation of a fast reactive embedded system using a real time operating system

Abstract

This paper presents the emulation of an embedded system with hard real-time constraints and response times of about 220 /spl mu/s. We show that for such fast reactive systems, the software overhead of a real time operating system becomes a limiting factor. We analyze the influence of novel microcontroller features, e.g., different on-chip caches, which tend to accelerate execution, but make it less predictable. These investigations have been conducted using our own emulation environment called SPYDER-CORE-P1.