A Radical Approach to Network-on-Chip Operating Systems

Operating systems were created to provide multiple tasks with access to scarce hardware resources like CPU, memory, or storage. Modern programmable hardware, however, may contain a large number of processing units on one chip working independently as systems-on-chip (SoC).It is feasible to build a system that provides each task of an embedded system with its own SoC and interconnects those in a network-on-chip (NoC). This requires radically new OS concepts for a parallel execution model. Each SoC runs tailor-made software components; traditional OS duties like memory protection, scheduling, or interrupt handling are no longer required for each SoC.The NoC OS consists of hardware and software that administers application-specific components and handles SoC communication and synchronization. Based on our previous experience with feature modeling and AOP, we describe our approach to create an FPGA-based NoC OS and discuss its impact on embedded software development in comparison to traditional methods.