GATOS: a windowing operating system for FPGAs

Abstract

FPGAs are increasingly being used to implement low-level vision operations in stand-alone configurations. For real-time image processing applications there is a need for several interactive operating system functions such as tuning, calibration, user interaction, and debugging which are difficult to perform when not under the control of a host operating system. This paper proposes the gate array terminal operating system (GATOS) which provides a set of high-level IP blocks that implement the graphical user interface of an interactive windowing operating system. The requirements and desired levels of functionality for GATOS are discussed and the preliminary design is presented.