ABSTRACT
We have conceptualized a hardware-software co-design strategy for creating I/O
interfacing hardware and device drivers for a real-time operating system that
executes on microcontrollers, enabling hardware independent access to I/O
devices at near-zero overhead. We achieve this low overhead through the
addition of a hardware mechanism to the microcontroller architecture that we
call nonaprocessors. The architecture extensions are orthogonal to the
underlying microarchitecture and can be implemented inexpensively, and are thus
suitable for use in low-cost microcontrollers. Our current research is to
validate this concept through extensive testing on a simulated processor, and to
measure the cost-effectiveness of the hardware architecture extensions over a
wide range of design choices.
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