Timing analysis of esterel programs on general-purpose multiprocessors

Abstract

Synchronous languages like Esterel have gained wide popularity in certain domains such as avionics. However, platform-specific timing analysis of code generated from Esterel-like specifications have mostly been neglected so far. The growing volume of electronics and software in domains like automotive, calls for formal-specification based code generation to replace manually written and optimized code. Such cost-sensitive domains require tight estimation of timing properties of the generated code. Towards this goal, we propose a scheme for generating C code from Esterel specifications for a multiprocessor platform, followed by timing analysis of the generated code. Due to dependencies across program fragments mapped onto different processors, traditional Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) analysis techniques for sequential programs cannot applied be to this setting. Our proposed timing analysis technique is tailored to capture such inter-processor code dependencies. Our main novelty stems from how we detect and remove infeasible paths arising from a multiprocessor implementation during our timing analysis. We apply our timing analysis on a number of standard Esterel benchmarks, which show that performing the proposed inter-processor infeasible path elimination may lead to up to 14.3% tighter estimation of the WCRT, thereby leading to resource over-dimensioning and poor design.