The ARPA Project: creating an open-source real-time system-on-chip

Abstract

This paper describes the ARPA project. The aim of this project is to develop an opensource System-on-Chip model for real-time applications. The main component of the SoC is a MIPS based RISC processor. It is implemented using a pipelined Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) structure, which allows exploring the Instruction and Task Level Parallelism, decrease the contexts witching time and avoid speculative execution. Another fundamental component of the SoC is the Operating System Coprocessor, which implements in hardware some of the operating system functions, such as task scheduling, switching, syrichronization, communication and timing. The proposed approach allows building high performanceand time predictable processors optimized for embedded real-time systems that consume less energy thari currently available superscalar processors.