ABSTRACT
Traditional development of software for embedded systems is highly platform specific. Exploiting a specific platform enables reducing cost of hardware to a minimum, whereas high development costs of software are considered acceptable in the case of large quantities of devices being sold. Nowadays, with ever more powerful processors in the low-cost range, we observe even more of a shift of functionality from hardware to software and a general tendency toward more ambitious requirements. Modern cars or airplanes, for example, contain dozens of the so-called electronic control units interconnected by multiple buses and are driven by several million lines of code. To cope with the increased complexity of the embedded software, a platform-independent “high-level” programming style becomes mandatory, as testing alone can never identify all the errors. In particular, in the case of safety-critical real-time software, this applies not only to functional aspects but to the temporal behavior of the software as well. Dealing with time, however, is not covered at all by any of the existing high-level imperative languages. Simulation environments that offer delay blocks allow at best the approximation of the simulated behavior to the behavior on the execution platform.
