Towards Creating Flexible Tool Chains for the Design and Analysis of Multi-Core Systems.

With the ever increasing complexity of today’s embedded systems, also the complexity of the design and development processes tends to grow. Experts from different domains and/or organizations work on different aspects of a product. Tool support is necessary for these activities, like design of hardware and software, requirements engineering and verification. While an increasing number of tools is available, these tools are usually not integrated. Hence, it is difficult to establish a traceability between data created by these tools and to access data created by a particular tool from within another tool that needs this data. As a consequence, the same information is manually created multiple times in different tools, or ad hoc tool integrations are created, which often work only for a particular use case and specific tools. In this paper we propose a strategy for flexible tool integration, which is to a large extent independent from concrete tools to be integrated. This strategy is based upon a metamodel defining common semantics of data, which is created and shared between the different tools involved in a development process. The metamodel is an extension of a framework developed in the SPES2020 project with added concepts necessary for the design and analysis of multi-core systems.