SHUM-uCOS: A RTOS using multi-task model to reduce migration cost between SW/HW tasks

The design of embedded systems has become more complex than ever, and the design qualities depend more on the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams: hardware engineers and software engineers in general. However, due to the lack of uniform programming model and system components for these different teams, the migrations costs of a function model from software to hardware are high. But these actions are necessary in the hardware-software partitioning of embedded systems, especially in the prototype designs. To cope with this problem, we adopt a uniform multi-task model and implement a RTOS (real-time operating system), called SHUM-uCOS, which deals with hardware functions as same as software tasks. This RTOS uses uCOSII as its prototype, traces and manages the states of reconfigurable resources (FPGAs), which allows the execution of hardware tasks in a true multitasking manner. Moreover, SHUM-uCOS also defines a standard hardware-task interface, which supports share-bus protocol. It has been proved by experiments that SHUM-uCOS can shorten the migration time from software implementations to hardware implementations with the performance improvement.