Towards Interprocess Communication and Interface Synthesis for a Heteogenous Real–Time Rapid Prototyping Environment

Rapid Prototyping has been proposed as a means to reduce development time and costs of real–time systems. Our approach uses a heterogeneous, tightly coupled multiprocessor system based on off–the–shelf components as target architecture for an executable prototype, which is generated from the specification in an automated design process. Here, too, we aim to use existing tools and languages. But interface and communication synthesis, while being the key requirement of an automated translation of a abstract specification to a distributed system, is not yet state–of–the–art. The sensitivity of the overall performance of multiprocessor systems to overhead and latency introduced by communication on the other hand calls for an efficient interprocess communication (IPC). This paper presents concept and implementation of IPC functions which, implementing the message queue semantics of the specification language SDL, links the standard components of our multiprocessor system in an efficient manner, while at the same time providing the interface synthesis needed by the automated generation of a rapid prototype. The experiences gained when implementing a non–trivial, real–world CAN controller and monitor application on our rapid prototyping environment, are described as a first proof of concept.