Heptane (Hades Embedded Processor Timing ANalyzEr)

Heptane is a static WCET analyzer for programs written in Ansi C, and is designed to produce timing information for a Pentium processor.

The following figure depicts the internal structure of the Heptane static WCET analysis tool. It is made of four parts:

1. A preprocessor that generates the program syntax tree.
2. The external retargetable assembly transformation tool Salto, used to obtain hardware-dependent information.
3. The core of Heptane that includes modules for the management of the instruction cache, the pipeline and the branch prediction mechanism.
4. The Maple tool, used to evaluate symbolic expressions.

Heptane takes as parameter one C source file and generates a set of XML files giving details on the WCET computations. Files are generated to provide information about: the syntax tree, the control flow graph, basic blocks, and results of all micro-architecture analysis.

Heptane

• Source code
• Source prepocessing (Hexane)
  • Syntaxic tree
  • Control flow graph
  • Assembly code
• Salto
• Heptane core
  • Instruction cache simulation
  • Branch prediction simulation
  • Pipeline simulation
  • Timing schema
• XML files
• Maple