Impact of Instruction Cache and Different Instruction Scratchpads on the WCET Estimate

Caches play an important role in embedded systems by bridging the performance gap between high speed processors and slow memory. At the same time, caches introduce imprecision in Worst-case Execution Time (WCET) estimation due to unpredictable access ...

This paper compares two proposed alternatives to conventional instruction caches: a scratchpad memory (SPM) and a method cache. The comparison considers the true worst-case execution time (WCET) and the estimated WCET bound of programs using either an ...

With the advent of increasingly complex hardware in real-time embedded systems (processors with performance enhancing features such as pipelines, caches, multiple cores), most embedded processors use a hierarchy of caches. While much research has been ...