Application mapping to a hardware platform through automated code generation targeting a RTOS: a design case study

Consistency, accuracy and efficiency are key aspects for practical usability of a system design flow featuring automatic code generation. Consistency is the property of maintaining the same behaviour at different levels of abstraction through synthesis and refinement, leading to functionally correct implementation. Accuracy is the property of having a good estimation of system performances while evaluating a high-level representation of the system. Efficiency is the property of introducing low overheads and preserving performances at the implementation level. The RTOS is a key element of the link to implementation flow. In this paper, we capture relevant high-level RTOS parameters that allow consistency, accuracy and efficiency to be verified in a top-down approach. Results from performance estimation are compared against measurements on the actual implementation. Experimental results on automatically generated code show design flow consistency, an accuracy error of about 0.66% and an overhead of about 11.8% in term of speed.