Abstract
The paper concerns research on electronics-embedded safety systems. The authors focus on the optimization of the energy consumed by multitasking real-time systems. A new flexible and reconfigurable multi-core architecture based on pipeline processing is proposed. The presented solution uses thread-interleaving mechanisms that allow avoiding hazards and minimizing unpredictability. The proposed architecture is compared with the classical solutions consisting of many processors and based on the scheme using one processor per single task. Energy-efficient task mapping is analyzed and a design methodology, based on minimizing the number of active and utilized resources, is proposed. New techniques for energy optimization are proposed, mainly, clock gating and switching-resources blocking. The authors investigate two main factors of the system: setting the processing frequency, and gating techniques; the latter are used under the assumption that the system meets the requirements of time predictability. The energy consumed by the system is reduced. Theoretical considerations are verified by many experiments of the system’s implementation in an FPGA structure. The set of tasks tested consists of programs that implement Mälardalen WCET benchmark algorithms. The tested scenarios are divided into periodic and non-periodic execution schemes. The obtained results show that it is possible to reduce the dynamic energy consumed by real-time applications’ meeting their other requirements.
Highlights
Received: 7 December 2021Real-time embedded systems represent one of the most important segments of the modern electronics market
In order to validate the approach to the multithread system design and support the theoretical analysis, the authors carried out a series of practical experiments on hardware
Making a simple comparison with the solutions presented in other works is difficult from this point of view, because either those works were implemented on commercial architectures or they dealt with dedicated applications
Summary
Real-time embedded systems represent one of the most important segments of the modern electronics market. They are one of the crucial parts of the safety systems operating in medicine, military, control systems, etc. One can observe the constant growth of the expectations of real-time systems over the years. Users require from such systems the highest reliability and long-lasting, failure-free operation. The present paper concerns a low-level approach to time-predictable systems. The authors focus on the hardware design of real-time system architectures. The last section summarizes the paper, discusses the results, draws conclusions, and formulates areas for further research
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