Static Timing Analysis of Shared Caches for Multicore Processors

Abstract

The state-of-the-art techniques in multicore timing analysis are limited to analyze multicores with shared instruction caches only. This paper proposes a uniform framework to analyze the worst-case performance for both shared instruction caches and data caches in a multicore platform. Our approach is based on a new concept called address flow graph, which can be used to model both instruction and data accesses for timing analysis. Our experiments, as a proof-of-concept study, indicate that the proposed approach can accurately compute the worst-case performance for real-time threads running on a dual-core processor with a shared L2 cache (either to store instructions or data).