Abstract

In embedded system design the selection of an adequate controller is an decisive step. The demands of the application must be characterized and should match the candidate processor. We base this selection on performance predictions and instruction set modeling. In this article we describe a way to automatically characterize controllers together with their respective compilers on the basis of a generic assembler. A generator produces test benches to measure and tabulate instruction timings on different CPUs. These are then used to predict the runtimes of the whole application running on the target hardware. Results for the table generation process, predictions and comparisons of different choices are given at hand of typical examples.

Citations