Fostering Analysis from Industrial Embedded Systems Modeling

In most industrial embedded systems development projects, the software and the hardware development parts are separated, and the constraint requirements/capabilities are informally exchanged in the system development phase of the process. To prevent failures due to the violation of timing constraints, hardware components of the platform are typically over dimensioned for the capabilities needed. This increases both cost and power consumption. Performance analysis is not done sufficiently at early stages of the development process to optimize the system. This chapter presents results of the integration of tools and extra modeling to offer new performance analysis capabilities in the early stages of the development process. These results are based on trace generation from code instrumentation. A number of enhancements were made, spanning the system modeling stage down to the execution stage (based on an ARM dual core Cortex A9-based target board). Final results taken from a software-based radio case study (including the analysis and validation stages) are presented.