Product category:
Embedded Software and Operating Systems
News Release from: LiveDevices | Subject: RTA version 3.0
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 12 December 2001
Automotive RTOS cuts hardware overkill
LiveDevices reckons its Realogy Real-Time Architect (RTA) version 3.0 is the automotive industry's first fully analysable, deterministic OSEK-compliant real-time operating system (RTOS).
LiveDevices reckons its Realogy Real-Time Architect (RTA) version 3.0 is the automotive industry's first fully analysable, deterministic OSEK-compliant real-time operating system (RTOS) RTA enables software developers to build quality and timing correctness into a new electronic control unit (ECU) when adopting an RTOS, rather than trying to test faults out
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 10 Aug 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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It can also be used to accurately identify stack requirements and CPU usage needed to implement a specific application.
This determinism ensures that manufacturers can support the maximum number of features using the minimum amount of processing power.
As result, they can significantly reduce their bill of materials for a new ECU, helping to increase profit margins over the car's lifespan.
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RTA guarantees that all deadlines allocated to the vehicle's applications will be met under any circumstances at the design stage.
It uses a mathematical technique known as deadline monotonic analysis (DMA) theory to carry out four types of rigorous assessment: schedulability analysis checks whether the system meet its deadlines or not; sensitivity analysis identifies the degree to which the execution time of tasks or interrupts can change and the system continue to meet its deadlines; priority allocation is used to arrange the execution of tasks so they can continue to meet deadlines while sharing memory usage, thus minimising memory requirements; and power usage minimisation determines the lowest frequency, and hence the lowest power at which the system can meet its deadlines.
The ease with which these various analyses can be performed is considerably enhanced by means of a GUI that supports assisted creation of the timing model and visualisation of analysis results.
This approach eliminates the risk of introducing timing faults (and so losing control of real-time behaviour) when adopting a conventional operating system.
For example, with some other OSEK OS implementations it is impossible to limit jitter in critical control functions.
Research has shown that the costs of identifying and fixing problems increases by a factor of 10 each stage after they occur.
For example, one published study indicated that design errors that were found during the design phase cost a few hundred pounds to fix, whereas the same errors detected during integration testing cost nearly two hundred thousand pounds.
By identifying schedulability problems at the outset, RTA not only reduces the number of design cycles that are required, but also speeds up the ECU's time to market.
RTA is compliant with the OSEK/VDX OS 2.1 specification, which defines a standard infrastructure for automotive ECUs and supports the re-useability of code and the direct portability of application modules.
RTA 3.0 provides enhancements to the OSEK specification, which allow the developer to make more efficient use of the operating system, while remaining OSEK compliant.
Enhancements include lightweight tasks (which reduce the per-task stack requirements to approximately one third of the standard task stack requirements), combined resources (an optional feature in OSEK 2.1) and internal resources (which are defined in the emerging 2.2 version of OSEK OS).
In addition to the enhancements, RTA provides extensions to the OSEK standard, for example the OSEK alarm mechanism is extended by also allowing synchronised activation of multiple tasks with varying periods by means of planned and periodic schedules.
These schedulability mechanisms can also be defined offline and in terms of milliseconds and seconds, or any other convenient user-defined units (such as degrees of rotation).
This means that counter devices and CPU speeds can be altered without changing the underlying timing behaviour of the application.
Tasksets allow improved efficiency by permitting many tasks to be activated in the time that it takes to activate a single task.
By enabling developers to accurately assess the resource requirements of each application, RTA also helps reduce the unit cost of each ECU.
It is no longer necessary to overspecify the hardware to meet the unknown memory and CPU usage requirements.
Instead, manufacturers can confidently put more control, comfort, safety and infotainment features on an existing processor prior to its launch or as part of a model "refresh" midway into its lifespan.
LiveDevices' RTA is a highly efficient and scaleable single stack operating system, which ensures hardware resources are only consumed for features that are used.
It has minimal system memory and processor clocks cycles overheads, and therefore runs on a wide range of microcontollers from 8 to 32bit.
Through the use of automatic priority allocation, stack RAM requirements can be significantly reduced.
Very low interrupt latencies and task switching times mean that the amount of CPU time spent executing operating system code is kept to a minimum.
Occupying an ultra-small footprint, typical RTA-based applications require around 1Kbyte of ROM and 200byte of RAM for the OS.
In addition to the schedulability analysis tool, RTA contains an OSEK Implementation Language (OIL) configuration tool and a compiled library that implements the OSEK API.
The OIL configuration tool parses OIL input files and outputs compact data structures.
The new product is currently undergoing OSEK v2.1 certification and support is provided for both the BCC1 and BCC2 conformance classes of OSEK/VDX OS.
The solution also interfaces with automotive design tools such as Volcano from Volcano Communications Technologies to verify that all communication signals between the data buses are sent and received within given deadlines.
"At the moment, over 30% of the cost of constructing a vehicle can be its electronics systems according to the analyst group Gartner Dataquest", commented Andy Coombes, product manager at LiveDevices.
"This product introduction establishes LiveDevices at the leading edge of real-time operating system development.
We are pioneering a new dependable approach to in-car electronics enabling an increased number of locally networked and Internet-enabled devices to be deployed rapidly, efficiently and reliably".
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