ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a methodology for the static estimation of the timing characterization of each system functionality, for both HW and SW implementations. It presents a strategy to efficiently analyze the timing characteristics of hardware/software embedded systems. For the software case, the proposed methodology concentrates on the essential aspects of the specification language and the common characteristics of assembly languages to derive an exact analytical model of the specification language structures. The chapter describes system-level co-estimation issues, focusing on performance co-estimation, describes the proposed approach and shows its applicability to the OCCAM language. High-level performance estimation has been one of the more relevant research fields because of the possibility of early checking the meet of the timing constraints, a fundamental goal in the field of real-time systems.
