Energy-Efficient Architecture for Embedded Software with Hard Real-Time Requirements in Partial Reconfigurable Systems

Embedded systems, because of their application-specific characteristic, are one of the most widely used domains for reconfigurable systems. Aiming at the energy-saving problem, this paper presents a dynamic scheduling architecture. The contribution of this paper is twofold: First, this paper presents an Energy-efficient Architecture for Embedded Software (EAES), which uses a processor with dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) capability and FPGA modules as the hardware platform, and extends directed acyclic graph with AND and OR relationship as the task model. Second, this paper presents a dynamic energy-saving method, which combines the pre-assignment of tasks with dynamic runtime scheduling, minimizing the energy consumption of tasks while meets their deadline requirements. This is work in progress. So far, we have designed and implemented the required critical hardware and software functions. Currently, we are focusing on the rest functions and system integration.