Interaction of embedded systems with their physical environment often imposes timing constraints on the embedded system’s software tasks. A key step in verifying that these constraints are met is to perform worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis of the software tasks. WCET analyses rely on detailed timing models of the execution platform. The development of timing models of modern execution platforms is a time-consuming and error-prone process that furthermore has to be repeated for every new execution platform. We propose to reverse this process:

1. Start by developing a timing model that enables precise and efficient WCET analysis, which can be developed once and for all.
2. Then develop different execution platforms conforming to this model. To allow for a wide range of efficient execution platforms, such a timing model can be parameterized in different architectural aspects, as for instance the sizes of different levels of the memory hierarchy and their respective latencies.

In this talk, I will present a class of such parameterized timing models and a precise parametric WCET analysis technique that can be applied to this class of models.