IMPLEMENTATION OF A REAL TIME OPERATING SYSTEM ON ALTERA'S CYCLONE IV FPGA

An operating system is a piece of software written for managing hardware resources and applications that run on top of the operating system. A real time operating system RTOS also does the same task, but it is specifically designed to serve applications that need stimulus in real time and provide the desired response in real time and with high reliability. Real time applications guarantee response within strict time constraints especially in milliseconds or sometimes even in microseconds. This response is important in measurement, control and automation systems. Porting a real time operating system to a microprocessor is a critical step in the field of embedded system engineering. To study this crucial step, this paper outlines the Board Support Package port of uC/OS-II to a custom RISC processor built using FPGA. The aim of this paper is to study the steps in designing a raw processor from logic elements, developing a BSP for it, porting a real time operating system on it and finally demonstrating task context switches, interrupts and inter-task communication using mailboxes on Altera’s DE2-115 development kit.