Software Scheduling in the Co-Synthesis of Reactive Real-Time Systems

Existing software scheduling techniques limit the functions that can be implemented in software to those with a restricted class of timing constraints, in particular those with a coarse-grained, uniform, periodic behavior. In practice, however, many systems change their I/O behavior in response to the inputs from the environment. This paper considers one such class of systems, called reactive real-time systems, where timing requirements can include sequencing, rate, and response time constraints. We present a static, non-preemptive, fine-grained software scheduling algorithm to meet these constraints. This algorithm is suitable for control-dominated embedded systems with hard real-time constraints, and is part of the core of a hardware/software co-synthesis system.