Rate derivation and its applications to reactive, real-time embedded systems

An embedded system (the system) continuously interacts with its environment under strict timing constraints, called the external constraints, and it is important to know how these external constraints translate to time budgets, called the internal constraints, on the tasks of the system. Knowing these time budgets reduces the complexity of the system's design and validation problem and helps the designers have a simultaneous control on the system's functional as well as temporal correctness from the beginning of the design flow. The translation is carried out by first deriving the rate of each task in the system, hence the term "rate derivation", using the system's task structure and the rates of the input stimuli coming into the system from its environment. The derived task rates are later used to derive and validate the rest of the internal as well as external constraints. This paper proposes a general task graph model to represent the system's task structure, techniques for deriving and validating the system's timing constraints, and a hardware/software codesign methodology that puts everything together.