Extending the Path Analysis Technique to Obtain a Soft WCET

1 Department of Computer Science, Furman University, Greenville SC 29613 USA; e-mail: [email protected] Abstract This paper discusses an efficient approach to statically compute a WCET that is “soft” rather than “hard”. The goal of most timing analysis is to determine a guaranteed WCET; however this execution time may be far above the actual distribution of observed execution times. A WCET estimate that bounds the execution time 99% of the time may be more useful for a designer in a soft real-time environment. This paper discusses an approach to measure the execution time distribution by a hardware simulator, and a path-based timing analysis approach to derive a static estimation of this same distribution. The technique can find a soft WCET for loops having any number of paths.