Hardware support for WCET analysis of hard real-time multicore systems

Abstract

The increasing demand for new functionalities in current and future hard real-time embedded systems like automotive, avionics and space industries is driving an increase in the performance required in embedded processors. Multicore processors represent a good design solution for such systems due to their high performance, low cost and power consumption characteristics. However, hard real-time embedded systems require time analyzability and current multicore processors are less analyzable than single-core processors due to the interferences between different tasks when accessing shared hardware resources. In this paper we propose a multicore architecture with shared resources that allows the execution of applications with hard real-time and non hard real-time constraints at the same time, providing time analizability for the hard real-time tasks so that they can meet their deadlines. Moreover our architecture proposal provides high-performance for the non hard real-time tasks.