Dynamic run-time HW/SW scheduling techniques for reconfigurable architectures

Dynamic run-time scheduling in System-on-Chip platforms has become recently an active area of research because of the performance and power requirements of new applications. Moreover, dynamically reconfigurable logic (DRL) architectures are an exciting alternative for embedded systems design. However, all previous approaches to DRL multi-context scheduling and HW/SW scheduling for DRL architectures are based on static scheduling techniques. In this paper, we address this problem and present: (1) a dynamic scheduler hardware architecture, and (2) four dynamic run-time scheduling algorithms for DRL-based multi-context platforms. The scheduling algorithms have been integrated in our codesign environment, where a large number of experiments have been carried out. Results demonstrate the benefits of our approach.