Static Timing Analysis Tool for ARM-based Embedded Software

Embedded systems have a set of tasks to execute. These tasks can be implemented either on application specific hardware or as software running on a specific processor. The design of an embedded system involves the selection of hardware software resources, Partition of tasks into hardware and software, and performance evaluation. An accurate estimation of execution time for extreme cases (best and worst case) is important for hardware/software codesign. A tighter estimation of the execution time bound nay allow the use of a slower processor to execute the code and may help lower the system cost. In this paper, we consider an ARM-based embedded system and developed a tool to estimate the tight boundary of execution time of a task with loop bounds and any additional program path information. The tool we developed is based on an exiting timing analysis tool named 'Cinderella' which currently supports i960 and m68k architectures. We add a module to handle ARM ELF object file, which extracts control flow and debugging information, and a module to handle ARM instruction set so that the new tool can support ARM processor. We validate the tool by comparing the estimated bound of execution time with the run-time execution time measured by ARMulator for a selected bechmark programs.