Embedded systems are widely used for supporting our every day life. In the area of safety-critical systems human life often depends on the system's correct behavior. Many of such systems are hard real-time systems, so that the notion of correctness not only means functional correctness. They additionally have to obey stringent timing constraints, i.e. timely task completion under all circumstances is essential. An example for such a safety-critical system is the flight control computer in an airplane, which is responsible for stability, attitude and path control.In order to derive guarantees on the timing behavior of hard real-time systems, the worst-case execution time (WCET) of each task in the system has to be determined. Saarland University and AbsInt GmbH have successfully developed the aiT WCET analyzer for computing safe upper bounds on the WCET of a task. The computation is mainly based on abstract interpretation of timing models of the processor and its periphery. Such timing models are currently hand-crafted by human experts. Therefore their implementation is a time-consuming and error-prone process.Modern processors or system controllers are automatically synthesized out of formal hardware specifications like VHDL or Verilog. Besides the system' functional behavior, such specifications provide all information needed for the creation of a timing model. But due to their size and complexity, manually examining the sources is even more complex than only looking at the processor manuals. Moreover, this would not reduce the effort nor the probability of implementation errors.To face this problem, this paper proposes a method for semi-automatically deriving suitable timing models out of formal hardware specifications in VHDL that fit to the tool chain of the aiT WCET analyzer. By this, we reduce the creation time of timing models from months to weeks.

Embedded hard real-time systems need reliable guarantees for the satisfaction of their timing constraints. Experience with the use of static timing-analysis methods and the tools based on them in the automotive and the aeronautics industries is positive. However, both the precision of the results and the efficiency of the analysis methods are highly dependent on the predictability of the execution platform. In fact, the architecture determines whether a static timing analysis is practically feasible at all and whether the most precise obtainable results are precise enough. Results contained in this paper also show that measurement-based methods still used in industry are not useful for quite commonly used complex processors. This dependence on the architectural development is of growing concern to the developers of timing-analysis tools and their customers, the developers in industry. The problem reaches a new level of severity with the advent of multicore architectures in the embedded domain. This paper describes the architectural influence on static timing analysis and gives recommendations as to profitable and unacceptable architectural features.