VLSI implementation and evaluation of a real-time operating system

This paper proposed a new approach to create a very high performance real-time operating system (OS) using VLSI technology. In this method, a quick and steady response can be guaranteed by implementing basic operations of a real-time OS as a peripheral chip (Silicon TRON) to be connected to general purpose microprocessors. To confirm the effectiveness of this method, most basic system calls of mu ITRON have been designed using an HDL. Synthesis results using a 0.8 mu m CMOS technology show that the most important part of the system calls can be realized as a VLSI chip. According to the evaluation results based on an FPGA implementation, the hardware portion of these functionalities can be executed within 250 ns and task scheduling can be performed with 750 ns simultaneously, both of which are approximately 6 to 50 times faster than software implementation. Accordingly, very high performance real-time systems can be created by the proposed method.