Real Time systems are systems which must give accurate results within a precise time period. These systems have now become an indispensable aspect of our day to day lives. As the importance of real time system increases, the need to ensure safety increases.
Imagine an intelligent sentry android with decision making ability which guards a frontier. It has to make quick analysis of images in order to decide whether it has to shoot, warn or say "howdy partner”. In such cases, it is desirable to make a correct calculation (to identify friends and foes) and also to make a correct timely behaviour after analysing data from its sensors. This is done by the inbuilt software of the android. There lies the risk of the sentry robot not matching the image within a given time and failing in functionality. For safety reasons, in such real time applications, where meeting deadlines is critical, it is sought-after to obtain the worst case execution time of programs.
Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) analysis finds the upper bound on the execution time of a program. By obtaining this, we can design a system which works fine even in the most stressed state. SWEdish Execution time Tool (SWEET) is a tool for WCET analysis developed by the Mälardalen WCET research group. SWEET performs static analyses on an intermediate code format named ALF (Artist2 Language for WCET flow Analysis) and finds an upper bound of the worst case execution time. aiT is another WCET tool developed by AbsInt company for static analysis in real time system. They maintain a format known as CRL (Control flow Representation Language) to represent various types of object code formats in terms of control flow graphs.
The main objective of this thesis work is to write a translator from CRL2's representation of PowerPC assembler code to ALF.