Collaboration delivers improved tool integration

The improved integration will better ensure the safety and reliability of automotive real-time software at the same time as speeding up development and reducing costs. The collaboration delivers Symtavision tool support for Best Trace Format (BTF), the preferred file format for the iSYSTEM debug and trace tool, enabling trace data from single and multicore ECU’s to be imported into TraceAnalyzer for visualisation and analysis of timing traces and validation of ECU scheduling.

Timing models generated from the traces can be processed further in SymTA/S to perform worst-case and statistical timing analyses, as well as to virtually change the scheduling and explore/optimise the overall software architecture. The optimised configuration can be passed back to the iSYSTEM debug and trace tool via an ECU configuration tool and uploaded to the target, completing the round-trip workflow.

Commenting on the improved tool integration and workflow, Dr. Kai Richter, CTO, Symtavision, said: “We have seen a lot of interest from companies wishing to take advantage of the integration of SymTA/S and TraceAnalyzer with iSYSTEM’s debug and trace tools in order to ensure the real-time safety and reliability of software. What was manual yesterday is now fully automated with the new features and functionality. The technical and commercial benefit is obvious: at the same time speeding up development and reducing development costs.”

“Engineers can only develop safe, failure-free code with quality tools,” said Erol Simsek, CEO, iSYSTEM. “This is why we have further collaborated with Symtavision to make iSYSTEM’s real hardware trace recordings and Symtavision’s SymTA/S and TraceAnalyzer tools work together. This integration extends the capabilities of real-time tracing and offline timing analysis to a much higher level. It supports the embedded engineer to ensure that potential timing issues can be linked more quickly to the source of failure.”