An agent-based reconfigurable system-on-chip architecture for real-time systems

For a real-time system who must adapt to the highly dynamic environments, instead of using a general processor, a reconfigurable multi-core system-on-chip (RMCSoC) architecture is applied in this paper. A unified agent-based hardware/software co-design methodology is proposed to optimize the system performance on this RMCSoC, and a self reconfigurable platform is proposed to enable the FPGA to dynamic reconfigure the hardware at runtime by an embedded processor. Due to the multi-agent implementation, a new communication mechanism between the agents is also presented. This proposed embedded framework is suitable for most real-time applications, such as mobile robots, embedded video systems, and even distributed real-time systems with enhanced communication capability.