HW/SW CO-design for μclinux-based real-time platform

Experiences show that the uRT51 introduces a very low perturbation on control applications with both priority disciplines. Moreover, the real-time performance is improved because the optimal priority discipline EDF is implemented with a neglected overhead. In this paper, we describe a HW/SW co-design platform for real-time systems. The platform proposes a mechanism for automatically selecting the best hardware configuration that satisfies both the temporal requirements of the real-time system and the resources available in the programmable logic device. This platform is based on a run-time analysis of the execution time of each real-time task and the selection of the adequate library from the C-compiler and its correspondently hardware configuration. The platform was designed for the Altera NIOS II soft-processor running μClinux Operating System for embedded real-time systems