TABLE OF CONTENTS Primitive operating systems were first introduced in the 1960s in order to relieve programmers ofcommon tasks such as those involving Input/Output (I/O). Gradually, scheduling and management ofmultiple jobs/programs became the purview of an Operating System (OS). Many fundamental advances, such as multithreading and multiprocessor support, have propelled both large companies and small to the forefront of software design.
Recent trends in chip design press the need for more advanced operating systems for System-on-a-Chip (SoC). However, unlike earlier trends where the focus was on scientific computing, today's SoC designs tend to be driven more by the needs of embedded computing. While it is hard to state exactly what constitutes embedded computing, it is safe to say that the needs of embedded computing form a superset of scientific computing. For example, real-time behaviour is critical in many embedded platforms due to close interaction with non-humans, e.g. rapidly moving mechanical parts. In fact, the Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) preceding SoC did not integrate multiple processors with custom hardware, but instead were almost exclusively digital logic specialised to a particular task and hence very timing predictable and exact. Therefore, we predict that advances in operating systems for SoC focusing on Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) design provide a more natural evolution for chip design as well as being compatible with real-time systems.
Furthermore, thanks to the recent trends in the technologies ofMultiProcessor SoC (MPSoC) and reconfigurable chips, many hardware Intellectual Property (IP) cores that implement software...
