CAREER: Hardware/Software Real-Time Operating System Design and Synthesis for System-on-a-Chip

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Future systems built on a billion-transistor chip will be immensely complex. These Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) will be built with multiple heterogeneous processor cores, and an operating system is needed to control the interactions between and computations occurring in both hardware and software. This project is developing a Systems-on-a-Chip Operating System (SoCOS) implementation with timing guarantees able to satisfy hard real-time application demands. The following topics are being explored: (1) a SoCOS compiler where part of the SoCOS is implemented in hardware in order to both speed up critical bottlenecks and more effectively manage concurrency among hardware and software; and (2) design and synthesis of a Dynamic Memory Management Unit (DMMU) in hardware for multiple processors and hardware, where the SoC has two main levels of memory hierarchy: each processor's local cache, and larger on-chip memory. The DMMU handles allocation of the larger on-chip memory; software on each processor handles its local cache. A quantification of the trade-offs among implementation and synthesis strategies for SoC Operating Systems is being investigated.