Optimizing the generation of object-oriented real-time embedded applications based on the real-time specification for Java

摘要

The object-oriented paradigm has become popular over the last years due to its characteristics that help managing the complexity in computer systems design. This feature also attracted the embedded systems community, as today's embedded systems need to cope with several complex functionalities as well as timing, power, and area restrictions. Such scenario has promoted the use of the Java language and its real-time extension (RTSJ) for embedded real-time systems design. Nevertheless, the RTSJ was not primarily designed to be used within the embedded domain. This paper presents an approach to optimize the use of the RTSJ for the development of embedded real-time systems. Firstly, it describes how to design real-time embedded applications using an API based on RTSJ. Secondly, it shows how the generated code is optimized to cope with the tight resources available, without interfering in the mandatory timing predictability of the generated system. Finally it discusses an approach to synthesize the applications on top of affordable FPGAs. The approach used to synthesize the embedded real-time system ensures a bounded timing behavior of the object-oriented aspects of the application, like the polymorphism mechanism and read/write access to object's data fields.