An approach to manage reconfigurations and reduce area cost in hard real-time reconfigurable systems

Abstract

This article presents a methodology for building real-time reconfigurable systems that ensures that all the temporal constraints of a set of applications are met while optimizing the utilization of the available reconfigurable resources. Starting from a static platform that meets all the real-time deadlines, our approach takes advantage of runtime reconfiguration in order to reduce the area needed while guaranteeing that all the deadlines are still met. This goal is achieved by identifying which tasks must be always ready for execution in order to meet the deadlines and by means of a methodology that also allows reducing the area requirements.