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Synthesis of Hard Real-Time Application Specific Systems

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Abstract

This paper presents a system level approach for the synthesis of hard real-time multitask application specific systems. The algorithm takes into account task precedence constraints among multiple hard real-time tasks and targets a multiprocessor system consisting of a set of heterogeneous off-the-shelf processors. The optimization goal is to select a minimal cost multi-subset of processors while satisfying all the required timing and precedence constraints. There are three design phases: resource allocation, assignment, and scheduling. Since the resource allocation is a search for a minimal cost multi-subset of processors, we adopted an A* search based technique for the first synthesis phase. A variation of the force-directed optimization technique is used to assign a task to an allocated processor. The final scheduling of a hard-real time task is done by the task level scheduler which is based on Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling policy. Our task level scheduler incorporates force-directed scheduling methodology to address the situations where EDF is not optimal. The experimental results on a variety of examples show that the approach is highly effective and efficient.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Dept., University of California, Los Angeles, CA

    Chunho Lee & Miodrag Potkonjak

  2. Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

    Wayne Wolf

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  1. Chunho Lee
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  2. Miodrag Potkonjak
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  3. Wayne Wolf
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Lee, C., Potkonjak, M. & Wolf, W. Synthesis of Hard Real-Time Application Specific Systems. Design Automation for Embedded Systems 4, 215–242 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008965304567

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