Hardware-Software Timing Coverification of Distributed Embedded Systems

Jih-Ming Fu and Trong-Yen Lee
Pao-Ann Hsiung
Sao-Jie Chen
Department of Electrical Engineering
Institute of Information Science
Department of Electrical Engineering
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
( IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems,
IEICE Publishers, Japan, accepted in May 2000.)

Abstract

Most of current codesign tools or methodologies only support validation in the form of cosimulation and testing of design alternatives. The results of hardware-software codesign of a distributed system are often not verified, because they are not easily verifiable. In this paper, we propose a new formal coverification approach based on linear hybrid automata, and an algorithm for automatically converting codesign results to the linear hybrid automata framework. Our coverification approach allows automatic verification of real-time constraints such as hard deadlines. Another advantage is that the proposed approach is suitable for verifying distributed systems with arbitrary communication patterns and system architecture. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated through several application examples. The proposed approach has also been successfully used in verifying deadline violations when there are inter-task communications between tasks with different period lengths.