Abstract

We have developed a hardware-assisted interprocess communication (IPC) that enables the design of a digital control system using component-based software on embedded microcontrollers. Embedded microcontrollers used to implement software for digital control systems usually have very limited resources. Most of today's digital control systems implemented on embedded micro- controllers do not use component-based software due to the high overhead associated with the communication between components.

The proposed communication mechanism reduces interprocess communication overhead, making it practical to be implemented on small embedded microcontrollers. The software of the communication mechanism can be integrated into a real-time operating system (RTOS) for embedded microcontrollers with little memory and CPU overhead. The hardware assist for the communication mechanism can be easily integrated into a processor core.

The key contribution of this work is the design of a low-overhead real-time hardware-assisted software-controlled communication mechanism that provides an improvement of approximately 30 times over existing software communication mechanisms. The proposed communication is a hardware-software codesigned mechanism, in which the requirements of the software define the enhancements made to the underlying hardware.