Optimized programmable hardware scheduler for reconfigurable MPSoCs

Abstract

Embedded System plays a vital role in consumer Industry. Complex applications need systems which contains multiple heterogeneous processors, running in parallel to speed up the system. Also due to area constraints, the processors are evolved in a single System on Chip called Multiprocessor System on Chip (MPSoC). The system should be reusable and debuggable, hence the designers designed and developed Reconfigurable MPSoCs rather than Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Multiprocessor System on Chip (MPSoC) platform plays a vital role in parallel processor architecture design. However the growth of number of processing elements in one chip, task decomposition and scheduling become major bottlenecks of MPSoC architecture. To execute the applications, the application software is splitted as tasks and mapped to the different available processors and scheduled the tasks as when to execute in the available processors when the resources are ready. Selection of most suitable candidates for execution in a particular processor is very much important. Hardware related tasks are executed in different hardware accelerators and software tasks in processors. The area occupied by the schedulers in memory is more in internal memory. For scheduling these tasks, a programmable hardware is developed as hardware scheduler in the reconfigurable MPSoC using NIOS II processor. The algorithm for optimized scheduling in the target architecture is proposed. The literature survey is made with the hardware scheduler and new target MPSoC architecture. Quartus II version 12.1 and SOPC Builder are used to configure the NIOS II processer. Nios II EDS software tool has been used to build the application code.