Towards power management verification of time-triggered systems using virtual platforms

Abstract

Mixed-Criticality Real-Time Embedded Systems (MCRTES) allow the integration of independent functions with different safety requirements. Furthermore, the implementation of MCRTES on Multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoC) is becoming more and more interesting due to their energy efficiency and performance advantages over distributed single core architectures. While this shift to highly integrated MPSoCs has performance, size and cost advantages, it also poses new challenges. Among these challenges are the temporal and spatial segregation of independent application, allowing each application to fulfill their timing requirements, and the consistent use of power management techniques. This becomes very important, since an inconsistent power management can smash the temporal segregation and lead to timing violations and finally to a failure of the overall system.This work proposes an initial approach for a functional power management verification of Time-Triggered systems, which can be used to implement MCRTES. The proposed verification approach compares a trace of a formal system level power management specification against a trace of the target platform software implementation obtained via its execution on an instrumented virtual platform. Our results on the evaluation of a MCRTES of a UAV computer confirm the applicability of our approach.