RTOS Acceleration Using Instruction Set Customization

As embedded system designs become increasingly more complex, the use of real-time operating systems (RTOS) becomes essential to meet time-to-market pressures and to contain non-recurring engineering costs. However, an RTOS consumes precious CPU cycles in return for the services it provides. Further, the RTOS is typically treated as a pure software entity and is subject only to minor adaptations. In this project, we leverage work done by our research group towards instruction set customization for RTOS acceleration using dedicated hardware and apply it to the Nios® II processor. We present our design, findings, and results in this paper.