Embedded System Design

by Peter Marwedel

Published 31 October 2003
"Embedded System Design" is intended as an aid for changing this situation. It provides the material for a first course on embedded systems, but can also be used by PhD students and professors. A key goal of this book is to provide an overview of embedded system design and to relate the most important topics in embedded system design to each other. It should help to motivate students as well as professors to put more emphasis on education in embedded systems. In order to facilitate teaching from this book, slides, exercises and other related material can be downloaded via the author's web page.

For real-time systems, the worst-case execution time (WCET) is the key objective to be considered. Traditionally, code for real-time systems is generated without taking this objective into account and the WCET is computed only after code generation. Worst-Case Execution Time Aware Compilation Techniques for Real-Time Systems presents the first comprehensive approach integrating WCET considerations into the code generation process. Based on the proposed reconciliation between a compiler and a timing analyzer, a wide range of novel optimization techniques is provided. Among others, the techniques cover source code and assembly level optimizations, exploit machine learning techniques and address the design of modern systems that have to meet multiple objectives.

Using these optimizations, the WCET of real-time applications can be reduced by about 30% to 45% on the average. This opens opportunities for decreasing clock speeds, costs and energy consumption of embedded processors. The proposed techniques can be used for all types real-time systems, including automotive and avionics IT systems.