Customizable RTOS to support communication infrastructures and to improve design space exploration in MPSoCs

Abstract

Multiprocessed System-on-Chip (MPSoCs) have become a recurrent implementation alternative to modern embedded systems and, lately, have counted on resources previously available only on general purpose machines. In this context, it is possible to highlight that many techniques formerly adopted in general-purpose computers have been studied and adapted to the embedded reality. Thus, embedded communication infrastructures such as buses and networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are based on general-purpose solutions and are widely accepted for embedded systems. Also, embedded systems make use of Operating Systems (OS), as they provide standard interfaces to access hardware resources, including the communication facilities. However, although the underlying communication infrastructure can differ in order to improve a given metric, such as performance, power or area, it is desirable that the software layer remains the same, especially in terms of the application's and OS's code improving the overall software quality. Still, certain OS parameters can directly influence on the overall system performance. This paper presents a highly configurable Real Time OS (RTOS) that implements a communication protocol to provide a transparent communication interface for both bus- and NoC-based MPSoCs' applications.