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Processor Support for Temporal Predictability - The SPEAR Design ExampleMartin Delvai, Wolfgang Huber, Peter Puschner, Andreas SteiningerTo appear at Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS03), Porto, Portugal, 2-4 July 2003
AbstractThe demand for predictable timing behavior is characteristic for real-time applications. Experience has shown that this property cannot be achieved by software alone but rather requires support from the processor. This situation is analyzed and mapped to a design rationale for SPEAR, a processor that has been designed to meet the specific temporal demands of real-time systems. At the hardware level, SPEAR guarantees interrupt response with minimum temporal jitter and minimum delay. Furthermore, the processor provides an instruction set that only has constant-time instructions. At the software level, SPEAR supports the implementation of temporally predictable code according to the single-path programming paradigm. Altogether these features support writing of code with minimal jitter and provide the basis for exact temporal predictability. Experimental results show that SPEAR indeed exhibits the anticipated highly predictable timing behavior.
10 Mar 2003 at 21:02:26 |