Visualised real-time operating system simulation in a heterogeneous prototyping environment

Understanding the behaviour of a complex real-time system is often a trying task for designers and implementors. The debugging tools of the target platform may be primitive, which makes the overall validation of the system laborious. Quite often the initial validation activities are moved to the development workstation where the development tool support is better. The Implementation Animator (IA) is a tool for visualization and testing of embedded real-time software in the workstation environment. It contains the simulation of a complete real-time operating system with detailed animation of the application behaviour as well as the operating system internals.