TrueTime: Simulation Tool for Performance Analysis of Real-Time Embedded Systems

Embedded systems and networked embedded systems play an increasingly important role in today’s society. They are often found in consumer products (e.g., in automotive systems and cellular phones), and are therefore subject to hard economic constraints. The pervasive nature of these systems generates further constraints on physical size and power consumption. These product-level constraints give rise to resource constraints on the implementation platform, for example, limitations on the computing speed, memory size, and communication bandwidth. Because of economic considerations, this is true in spite of the rapid hardware development. In many applications, using a processor with a larger capacity than strictly necessary cannot be justified.