Retargetable Static Timing Analysis for Embedded
Software [abstract] (IEEE Xplore, PDF, PostScript, ACM DL)
Kaiyu Chen, Sharad Malik, and David I. August
Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on System
Synthesis (ISSS), October 2001.
This paper presents a novel approach for retargetable
static software timing analysis. Specifically, we target the problem
of determining bounds on the execution time of a program on modern
processors, and solve this problem in a retargetable software
development environment. Another contribution of this paper is
the modeling of important features in contemporary architectures, such
as branch prediction, predication, and instruction pre-fetching, which
have great impact on system performance, and have been rarely handled
thus far. These ideas allow to build a timing analysis tool that is
efficient, accurate, modular and retargetable. We present preliminary
results for sample embedded programs to demonstrate the applicability
of the proposed approach.