A Co-design Flow for Reconfigurable Embedded Computing System with RTOS Support

Reconfigurable system provides both flexibility of software and performance of hardware. It is a significant trend in embedded application domain. Some new reconfigurable technologies and technology-dependent tools have been developed, but the whole design flow for run-time reconfigurable systems with real-time operating system support is not proposed. RTOS plays an important role in the system and the co-design flow. The special requirements for reconfigurable embedded systems with RTOS support are analyzed, and a novel co-design flow is proposed in this paper. A design case is presented here, which shows the co-design flows of the implementation of an adaptive signal filtering system on a commercially available reconfigurable platform. The results show that using run-time reconfiguration can save over 66% area when compared to a functionally equivalent fixed system and achieve 24 times speedup in processing time when compared with a functionally equivalent pure software design.