Hardware Tracing of Embedded Multi-Core Real-Time Systems 2017-01-1679

In the automotive industry a steady increase in the number of functions driven by innovative features leads to more complex embedded systems. In the future even more functions will be implemented in the software, especially in the areas of automatic driving assistance functions, connected cars, autonomous driving, and mobility services. To satisfy the increasing performance requirements, multi- and many-core controllers are used, even in the classic automotive domains. This case study has been conducted in the steering system domain, but the results can be applied to other areas as well. Safety critical functions of classic automotive domains must fulfill strict real-time requirements to avoid malfunctions, which can potentially endanger people and the environment. For this reason, ISO 26262 requires verification of the performance and timing behavior of system critical functions. Besides timing simulation and static analysis, tracing techniques can be used to record the dynamic system behavior and verify the timing requirements based on the recorded trace data. In this paper, different trace techniques are compared to identify a solution, which is able to verify all relevant timing requirements of an embedded system by recording a trace with sufficient length, number of trace objects, and measurement accuracy. To reach this goal, existing tools are combined and a possible workflow for trace based real-time verification is suggested.