A Framework for Static Analysis of VHDL Code

Software in real time systems underlies strict timing constraints. These are among others hard deadlines regarding the worst-case execution time (WCET) of the application. Thus, the computation of a safe and precise WCET is a key issue1 for validating the behavior of safety-critical systems, e.g. the flight control system in avionics or the airbag control software in the automotive industry. Saarland University and AbsInt Angewandte Informatik GmbH have developed a successful approach for computing the WCET of a task. The resulting tool, called aiT, is based on the abstract interpretation [3, 4] of timing models of the processor and its periphery. Such timing models are hand-crafted and therefore error-prone. Additionally the modeling requires a hard engineering effort, so that the development process is very time consuming. Because modern processors are synthesized from a formal hardware specification, e.g., in VHDL or VERILOG, the hand-crafted timing model can be developed by manually analyzing the processor specification. Due to the complexity of this step, there is a need for support tools that ease the creation of analyzes on such specifi- cations. This paper introduces the primer work on a framework for static analyzes on VHDL.