Hardware-software partitioning of soft multi-core cyber-physical systems

Abstract

Single microcontroller embedded systems cannot easily satisfy the computational requirements of systems observing physical phenomena via multiple channels at high sampling rates. Flash FPGAs can provide the necessary trade-off between adaptivity and computational power, however, fewer developers are familiar with them. Thus, we propose a soft multi-core architecture in the fabric forming a loosely coupled network with a queue-based messaging framework for inter-core communication. This platform provides parallel improvements (as per Amdahl's Law) and a familiar Harvard abstraction. The nesC language was chosen for programming, as it enables modularity and assignment of independent tasks to cores. The single core development environment was augmented to help with the transition to the new architecture. A cycle accurate system simulator, called Avrora, was enhanced to fully support multi-core platforms and whole sensor networks. The architecture provides better power consumption and response time properties for time critical applications by effectively pipelining tasks.