The Design of Multitasking Based Applications on Reconfigurable Instruction Cell Based Architectures

This paper presents a new direct implementation of a popular RTOS with an associated application - the WiMAX physical layer - on reconfigurable computing architectures. A novel coarse-grained reconfigurable instruction cell based architecture is chosen as the target architecture. Firstly an RTOS - Micro C/OS-II - was ported to the target architecture, and then the WiMAX physical layer program was partitioned into multiple OS tasks which communicate with each other through the synchronization approaches provided by this RTOS. The WiMAX physical layer program has been also implemented on the ARM7TDMI processor. The results show that the performance of the target architecture is much better than the ARM7TDMI, and not limited by the bottleneck of memory latency.