Multiprocessor and operating system design for signal processing on an FPGA

Abstract

Multiprocessor systems are a way to increment the flexibility and performance of embedded computing engines. These systems, which rely on application parallelization, require a different design paradigm than system-on-a-chip (SoC), which does not scale to multicore systems. This paper presents a single FPGA multiprocessor development platform with network style interconnects for signal processing applications. Along with the computing platform, a custom built operating system is presented. The operating system presented in this work is called LightOS. LightOS is a lightweight operating system targeted at signal processing applications. The multiprocessor platform is functionally verified through the use of an FFT benchmark application. Furthermore, the study shows that the embedded platform combined with LightOS is suitable for signal processing algorithm development on an FPGA.