Hardware Implementation of a Time Management Unit (TMU)

This thesis describes the implementation of a Time Management Unit (TMU) in hardware as specified by Gregertsen and Skavhaug, the specification and implementation of several improvements to the proposed specification, and the creation of a software framework to enable use of the module in a convenient way. A set of thorough automatic functional tests are also described and provided. The performance of the module is assessed and discussed. A user description similar to the AVR32 UC3 datasheets is also created.The TMU has been implemented as a hardware module on the peripheral bus (APB) on the AVR32 UC3 microcontroller, which makes it easy to develop and test stand-alone, and simple to integrate into future UC3 microcontrollers. Also, as the APB interface of the AMBA standard is an open standard used by several System-on-a-chip (SoC) designs, the module can be implemented on other microcontrollers with very low effort.The final product makes it possible to measure and control the execution time of tasks with high precision and low overhead. It supports atomic swapping of registers in a manner closely related to a context switch.Gregertsen and Skavhaugs s research in implementing support for the Ada language and run-time environment on the UC3 microcontroller will benefit directly from this project, as the system relies on the hardware support provided by the TMU. Also, as the project can be used in proving that hardware support of execution time monitoring may allow for new ways of ensuring schedulability in real-time systems, it can possibly be a part of a new direction in real-time research