Tool integration cuts development costs

The existing workflow, which enables real-time traces from TRACE32 to be imported and analysed using Symtavision’s SymTA/S and TraceAnalyzer timing design and analysis tools, has been significantly improved to facilitate better support of rich traces with wait and release behaviour, the import of traces with runnable activity within tasks and the ability to import and analyse functional-level traces generated by TRACE32.

With the Symtavision / Lauterbach joint workflow, code for automotive ECUs is imported into TRACE32 from any third party ECU configuration tool for target debugging, emulation and software validation. Trace data from ECU measurements or hardware independent simulations is then passed to TraceAnalyzer to visualise and analyse timing traces and validate ECU scheduling.

The resulting timing models can be processed further in SymTA/S to perform worst-case and statistical timing analysis, as well as to virtually change the scheduling and explore / optimize the overall software architecture. The optimised configuration is then passed back to TRACE32 via the third party ECU configuration tool and uploaded to the target, completing the round-trip workflow.

Commenting on the extended collaboration between Symtavision and Lauterbach and the improved tool integration, Dr. Kai Richter, CTO of Symtavision, said: “We have seen a lot of interest from companies wishing to take advantage of the integration of SymTA/S and TraceAnalyzer with TRACE32 in order to ensure the real-time safety and reliability of software at the same time as speeding up development and reducing cost. The new features and functionality afforded by the extended integration greatly enhance their ability to achieve these objectives on an ongoing basis both in relation to current software architectures and potential future software extensions.”

“We are pleased to see TraceAnalyzer working together with TRACE32 is such a professional way,” said Rudi Dienstbeck from Lauterbach. “This integration extends the capabilities of our real-time tracing tools to a much higher level. I'm excited to watch how TraceAnalyzer uses the real-time data captured by TRACE32 to evaluate the scheduling and run-times of the actual ECU, and perform a comprehensive requirement analysis.”