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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.