Networks on Chip as Hardware Components of an OS for Reconfigurable Systems

In complex reconfigurable SoCs, the dynamism of applications requires an efficient management of the platform. To allow run-time allocation of resources, operating systems and reconfigurable SoC platforms should be developed together. The operating system requires hardware support from the platform to abstract the reconfigurable resources and to provide an efficient communication layer. This paper presents our work on interconnection networks which are used as hardware support for the operating system. We show how multiple networks interface to the reconfigurable resources, allow dynamic task relocation and extend OS-control to the platform. An FPGA implementation of these networks supports the concepts we describe.