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.