Run-time support for heterogeneous multitasking on reconfigurable SoCs

In complex reconfigurable systems on chip (SoC), the dynamism of applications requires an efficient management of the platform. To allow run-time management of heterogeneous resources, operating systems (OS) and reconfigurable SoC platforms should be developed together. For run-time support of reconfigurable architectures, the OS must abstract the reconfigurable computing resources and provide an efficient communication layer. This paper presents our efforts to simultaneously develop the run-time support and the communication layer of reconfigurable SoCs. We show that networks-on-chip (NoC) are an ideal communication layer for dynamically reconfigurable SoCs, explain how our OS provides run-time support for dynamic task relocation and detail how hardware parts of the OS are integrated into the higher layers of the NoC. An implementation of the OS and of the dedicated communication layer on our reconfigurable architecture supports the concepts we describe.

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