Hardware-software co-synthesis of hard real-time systems with reconfigurable FPGAs

Real-time systems cover a wide application domain. This paper presents an efficient heuristic algorithm for enforcing the schedulability of aperiodic hard real-time tasks arriving simultaneously with precedence constraints and individual deadlines. The proposed co-synthesis algorithm integrates partitioning and nonpreemptive scheduling. Reconfigurable FPGAs are incrementally added when schedulability suffers in a uniprocessor system. Initially, a schedule that minimizes the maximum lateness and satisfies the precedence constraints is made. If individual timing constraints are not met in this schedule, some tasks are selected and transferred to dynamically reconfigured FPGAs. The proposed algorithm was implemented and tested with a large number of task graphs with task size as high as 700 nodes. The algorithm could not only achieve schedulability but also could reduce the total completion time of the task graph. Moreover, incremental addition of reconfigurable FPGAs yielded a cost effective solution. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.