Hardware implementation of a real-time operating system

This paper proposes a new approach to realize a very high performance real-time OS using VLSI technology. In this method, quick and steady response can be guaranteed by implementing basic operations of a real-time OS as a peripheral chip (Silicon TRON) to be connected to general purpose microprocessors. In order to confirm the effectiveness of this method, most basic system calls of μITRON have been designed using an HDL. Synthesis results using a 0.8 μm CMOS technology show that most important part of the system calls can be realized as a VLSI chip. According to the evaluation results based on an FPGA implementation, hardware portion of these functionalities can be executed within 250 ns and the task scheduling can be performed within 750 ns simultaneously, which are about 6 to 50 times faster than software implementation. Accordingly, very high performance real-time systems can be realized by the proposed method