Performance analysis of a RTOS by emulation of an embedded system

We analyze the performance of two different real-time operating systems. Therefore, we used a real benchmark embedded system design with fast external reaction times of about 220 /spl mu/s. We show that for such fast reactive systems, the software overhead of a real-time operating system becomes a limiting factor. We analyze the influence of novel microcontroller features, e.g., different on-chip caches, which tend to accelerate execution, but make it less predictable. These investigations have been conducted using our own emulation environment called SPYDER-CORE-P1.