Reducing the Overhead of Real-Time Operating System through Reconfigurable Hardware

This paper demonstrates the benefits of hardwiring two of the main RTOS functionalities for multitasking environment. They are context switching and software interrupt processing operations. In particular, the paper proposes reconfiguring the FPGA which includes the proposed one time reconfigurable CPU and RTOS hardware, optimized for a given application by tailoring the entire hardware around the particular tasks involved. As a demonstration, the proposed RTOS hardware was designed and tested on a multichannel speaker system application to yield 60% performance increase over the conventional software- based RTOS.