RTOS-aware modeling of embedded hardware/software systems

Modern embedded systems such as mobile phones or electronic control units from the automotive domain include a bulk of highly complex and highly interacting functions. Due to several reasons—flexibility and cost effectiveness may be the most important ones—a large and permanently growing part of these functions is implemented in software. This comes along with the demand for more and more processing power, paving the way for multi-core architectures, and widespread use of real-time operating systems. Application software implementation and operating system configuration strongly influence the overall system behavior. Design methodologies for such complex systems, consisting of hardware, software and real-time operating systems, must provide an early, model-based view on the overall system. The approach described in this paper enables automatic generation of system-level models of complex systems from abstract application specifications. Additionally, a compiler-based technique allows automatic calculation of precise software runtime information and annotation of the generated model. The resulting system-level model facilitates early exploration of systems on high level of abstraction, taking into account functional and temporal characteristics of hardware, software and real-time operating system. A key feature of the approach is its high accuracy, which is shown by applying it to an industrial application from the automotive domain.