Research On Operating System For Reconfigurable Hybrid Systems

Embedded computer systems are omnipresent. They can be found in almost all parts of our infrastructure that are directly and consciously used by people day-to-day, or that are not consciously perceived by most of people. Examples of such systems are PDAs, Mp3 players, mobile phones, network nodes, medical treatment systems and wearable computers etc. Commonly, An Embedded System can be composed of computing units, I/O devices, an operating system and user applications etc. Optional computing unit could be ASIC, ISP or FPGA. FPGA is a kind of reconfigurable hardware with high performance and flexibility for programming, which is appropriate for applications combining high performance demands with frequent changes of their workloads. With the increasing request on complexity, performance and time-to-market of embedded computer systems, FPGA is becoming more and more popular.With the development of semiconductor technology, the capability of SRAM based FPGA has achieved several millions of gates. The partially reconfigurable FPGA can load, execute or delete individual hardware logic blocks at runtime which makes FPGA runtime allocable computing resource. The hybrid system composed of FPGA and ISP has the advantages of high performance, flexible programmability and more extensive usage, and it has become the focus of research in the recent years.On the traditional opinion of designers, FGPA acts as the accelerator of hardware that managed directly by the programmers, while the operating system afford no more support than some device drivers. This manner leads to a complicated design flow in the process of development. Furthermore, it is inefficient because of ignoring the potential parallelism of the individual logic blocks. The...