This paper presents a hardware architecture for supporting distributed real-time operating systems. It proposes the use of dedicated hardware units for running task scheduling and communication, in ...order to alleviate the load on the precursor responsible for running the application tasks. These hardware units also compute the execution time of applications tasks, and other statistics that can be taken into account by more sophisticated scheduling algorithms. The proposal enhances the overall system predictability. Since it is based on low-cost microcontrollers, it represents a cost-effective alternative for developing low-cost distributed real-time systems.
This paper presents a hardware architecture and its FPGA implementation for real-time operating systems support. Dedicated hardware units are responsible for the maintenance of a 32 tasks list ...organized by time priority. The co-processor also communicates with the microprocessor to program interrupt modes and tasks. This dedicated HW architecture was easily prototyped in modern FPGAs, being a cost-effective solution to free microcontrollers from the burden of task time management. The FPGA has been completely synthesized based on a HDL description, allowing its use as a macrocell in larger designs. The task resolution is of 100 /spl mu/s.
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