System Architecture for Software Peripherals

Abstract

Software peripherals [1] have been proposed as a design alternative to traditional peripherals. We propose a software architecture, design methodology and scheduling scheme for implementing software peripherals on general purpose processors, with fast context switch and high resolution timers. Our design flow automatically generates code for scheduling software peripherals. We demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed work by experimenting with a set of five software peripherals scheduled to execute on a MIPS processor. Our performance evaluations show that the performance impact of the software peripherals on user-level tasks is minimal (i.e., 10.11% on a 100 MHz processor ) -strongly suggesting that with the right architecture, software peripherals can be efficiently accomodated in typical embedded applications.