Real-time reconfigurable embedded system for remote monitoring and controlling

Reconfigurable embedded system provides a flexible platform for hardware circuit implementation. Embedded systems often come with stringent performance and power requirements, leading the designers to incorporate special purpose hardware accelerator into their design. Furthermore, the tight timing requirement for the software design can be met using real time operating system. In this paper, we have developed a real-time reconfigurable embedded system for remote handling of I/O devices using Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA. Soft core processor, Xilinx MicroBlaze, is incorporated with the general purpose operating system, known as uClinux, coupled together with RTLinux patches. The maximum scheduling latency observed under heavy load condition is reduced from 420 milliseconds to 76 microseconds in our system. Based on our formulated equation and measurement, a maximum of three real-time tasks can be periodically scheduled with 250 microsecondpsilas interval in our system. However, this number can be increased by enlarging the scheduling period of the real-time task.