Heterogeneous CPU/FPGA Reconfigurable Computing System for Avionic Test Application

Real-time computing systems are increasingly used in aerospace and avionic industries. In the face of power wall and real-time requirements, hardware designers are directed towards reconfigurable computing with the usage of heterogeneous CPU/FPGA systems. However, there is a lack of real-time environments able to deal with the execution of applications on such heterogeneous systems dedicated to avionic Test and Simulation (T&S). This research investigates the problem of soft real-time environments for CPU/FPGA systems and proposes first a high-performance hardware architecture used to implement intimately coupled hardware and software avionic models. Second, this paper presents the description of an efficient real-time software environment for the model's execution, the multi-core CPU monitoring and the runtime task re-allocation to avoid the timing constraint violation. Experimental results underpin the industrial relevance of the presented approach for avionic T&S systems with real-time support.