The last 10 years have seen significant advances in automotive electronics. The adoption of multiplex wiring enabled the integration of advanced features such as stability control systems, active suspension and hybrid drive-trains as well as advanced engine management and transmission control systems. These compute-intensive applications required the adoption of the latest high performance embedded microprocessors.

As the functionality provided by Electronic Control Units (ECUs) becomes more complex, so the job of testing for correct functional and, in particular, correct timing behaviour becomes ever more difficult. This is a major issue for the automotive industry. The number of breakdowns that can be traced back to bugs in the electronic systems is over 50%. The damage that intermittent software glitches can do to profit margins is considerable, with production delays, no-fault-found ECU replacements and damage to the company’s reputation. As an example of the scale of this problem, in 2003, warranty expenditure by automotive companies in the US exceeded $11Bn with as much as half of this expenditure related to problems with embedded software. As a result, there is considerable interest in engineering approaches and tools, such as RapiTime, that can be used to detect potential timing problems during development.