Research On Core Technology Of Real-Time Embedded Operating Systems For Multiple FPGAs

Nowadays, with the capacity of today’s FPGA microprocessor chip greatlyenhanced it brings the strong development of the FPGA microprocessor chips’functions and the performance, so the multiprocessor system constituted by the FPGAbecomes more and more favored by the industry. As its hardware architecture its mainco-processor is generally composed of several different types of FPGA chip in orderto meet the high efficiency, good flexibility and scalability requirements, allowingcomplex parallel processing and real-time control. With the increasingly widespreadapplication of multi-FPGAs system architecture, it brings unprecedented challengesfor the software system on top of the hardware system, as the core of the softwaresystem and support the research of the real-time embedded operating system orientedthe multi-FPGAs has become a key issue in the development of multi-FPGAsembedded system design, there are some multi-FPGAs core and key technologies forembedded operating systems such as starting the embedded operating system kerneland mutual exclusion between multiple FPGA task communication and multi-taskscheduling mechanism and so on. Therefore it becomes particularly important toachieve the core technology to support real-time embedded operating system-drivenmulti-FPGAs architectures.This subject is based on the multiple FPGAs chip hardware platform and doesthe study on the real-time embedded operating system core technology which is ontop of the heterogeneous multi-FPGAs system architecture. The Hardware structure ofthe multi-FPGAs platform is that the Spartan-6FPGA processors is as the hostprocessor which is responsible for the control and management of the other processorchips, and two Virtex-5FPGA processors are as a coprocessor, which is responsiblefor the information of the system acquisition and data processing. This mainlyresearches the real-time embedded operating system which could drive themulti-FPGAs, and the key point is that this can be adapted for multi-FPGAsembedded operating system kernel, mutually exclusive communication mechanismbetween multiple FPGA tasks and multi-FPGAs task scheduling mechanism, therefore,we choose embedded Linux operating system and Xilkernel embedded operatingsystem for the study, and research and improve the operating system kernel,inter-process communication and process scheduling，especially focus on the researchand analysis regarding the two embedded operating system kernel architecture, theimpact of the multi-FPGAs architectures for embedded operating systems andoperating system how to better organize and coordinate mutual exclusion betweenmultiple FPGAs communication and task scheduling，and we complete the design and implementation process of the key core technology-driven real-time embeddedoperating system for multi-FPGAs.This subject is designed to solve the problem that most operating systems cannotbe good support and drive multiple FPGAs architecture，this article designed andimplemented the real-time embedded operating system kernel which can drivemulti-FPGAs, as well as multi-task communication between the schedulingmechanism and also successfully transplanted the improved operating system and didits test results summary and analysis, to verify the correctness and scientific nature ofthe real-time embedded operating system core technology-driven multi-FPGAs.