Safety-critical applications with real-time requirements need worst-
case program runtimes to be estimated. A novel solution from leading tool specialists Lauterbach and AbsInt makes such runtime analyses even faster and easier.
The earlier in the development process software errors are discovered, the more efficiently they can be fixed. In the development of embedded systems, methods such as real-time tracing are essential. For many decades, Lauterbach’s PowerTrace modules have been the market leader for real-time tracing in the embedded industry, providing highly detailed
information about the program flow, interrupts, and task switches.
Retrieving and analyzing this data is the basis for AbsInt’s tool, TimeWeaver, which uses the measured execution times of code sections from real-time tracing to determine the most reliable estimate of the worst-case execution time (WCET).
“Thanks to our excellent cooperation, WCET analyses are now more viable for more complex processors”, says Dr. Christian Ferdinand, managing director of AbsInt Angewandte Informatik. “Developers of embedded software can now reach their goals even faster by utilizing data from our real-time traces for static WCET analyses”, explains Norbert Weiss, managing director of Lauterbach GmbH. “The joint solution with AbsInt represents a majorimprovement in the development of safety-critical applications, especially those with real-
time requirements.”
In close cooperation between the two companies, the memory requirements for the exchanged data have now been dramatically reduced through compression and innovative optimization, which means that TimeWeaver delivers its results significantly faster, while
requiring less memory.
The combination of PowerTrace and TimeWeaver supports all current CPU architectures, even complex heterogeneous SoCs, with the fastest trace tools in the industry, suitable for all embedded projects where WCET runtime analysis is required.
Accelerated Runtime Analyses Facilitate Software Development
