Real-Time Operating System Hardware Extension Core for System-on-Chip Designs

Abstract

This thesis presents a real-time operating system hardware extension core which supports the integration of hardware accelerators into real-time system-on-chip designs as hardware tasks. The hardware extension core utilizes reconfigurable logic to manage synchronization events, data transfers, and hardware task control. A reduction in interrupt latency, frequency, and execution time provides performance and predictability improvements for real-time applications. Required communication between the CPU and hardware accelerators is also reduced significantly. Compared to a software implementation, synthetic benchmarks of common synchronization tasks show up to a 41% increase in synchronization performance. Analysis of a test case design for audio encoding and encryption using three hardware accelerators shows results of a 2.89x throughput improvement in comparison to the use of software device driver tasks. Overall, this design simplifies the integration of hardware accelerators into real-time system-on-chip designs while improving the performance and predictability of these systems.