CORDS: Hardware-Software Co-Synthesis of Reconfigurable Real-Time Distributed Embedded Systems

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are commonly used in embedded systems. Although it is possible to re-configure some FPGAs while an embedded system is op-erational, this feature is seldom exploited. Recent im-provements in the flexibility and reconfiguration speed of FPGAs have made it practical to reconfigure them dynam-ically, reducing the amount of hardware required in an embedded system. We have developed a system, called CORDS, which synthesizes multi-rate, real-time, periodic distributed embedded systems containing dynamically re-configurable FPGAs. Executing different tasks on the same FPGA requires that potentially time-consuming re-configuration be carried out between tasks. CORDS uses a novel preemptive, dynamic priority, multi-rate schedul-ing algorithm to deal with this problem. To the best of our knowledge, dynamically reconfigured FPGAs have not previously been used in hardware-software co-synthesis of embedded systems. Experimental results indicate that us-ing dynamically reconfigured FPGAs in distributed real-time embedded systems has the potential to reduce their price and allow the synthesis of architectures which meet system specifications that would otherwise be infeasible.