In the last decade, the market for Critical Real-Time
Embedded Systems (CRTES) has increased significantly. According
to Global Markets Insight [1], the embedded systems
market will reach a total size of US $258 billion in 2023
at an average annual growth rate of 5.6%. Their extensive
use in domains such as automotive, aerospace and avionics
industry demands ever increasing performance requirements
[2]. To satisfy those requirements the CRTES industry has
implemented more complex processors, a higher number of
memory modules, and accelerators units. Thus the demanding
performance requirements have led to a merge of CRTES with
High Performance systems. All of these industries work within
the framework of CRTES, which puts several restrictions in
their design and implementation. Real Time systems require
to deliver a response to an event in a restricted time frame
or deadline. Real-time systems where missing a deadline
provokes a total system failure (hard real-time systems) need
satisfy certain guidelines and standards to show that they
comply with test for functional and timing behaviour. These
standards change depending on the industry, for instance the
automotive industry follows ISO 26262 [3] and the aerospace
industry follows DO-178C [4]. Researches have developed
techniques to analyse the timing correctness in a CRTES.
Here, we will expose how they perform on the estimation
of the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET). The WCET is
the maximum time that a particular software takes to execute.
Estimating its value is crucial from a timing analysis point of
view. However there is still not a generalised precise and safe
method to produce estimates of WCET [5]. In the CRTES
the estimations of the WCET cannot be lower than the true
WCET, as they are deemed unsafe; but they cannot exceed it
by a significant margin, as they will be deemed pessimistic
and impractical
