Predicting timing performance of advanced mechatronics control systems

Embedded control is a key product technology differentiator for many high-tech industries, including ASML. The strong increase in complexity of embedded control systems, combined with the occurrence of late changes in control requirements, results in many timing performance problems showing up only during the integration phase. The fallout of this is extremely costly design iterations, severely threatening the time-to-market and time-to-quality constraints. This paper reports on the industrial application at ASML of the Y-chart method to attack this problem. Through the largely automated construction of executable models of a wafer scanner's mechatronics control application and platform, ASML was able to obtain high-level overview early on in the development process. The system wide insight in timing bottlenecks gained this way resulted in more than a dozen improvement proposals yielding significant performance gains. These insights also led to a new development roadmap of the mechatronics control execution platform.