Task Mapping and Scheduling in FPGA-based Heterogeneous Real-time Systems: A RISC-V Case-Study

Heterogeneous platforms, that integrate CPU and FPGA-based processing units, are emerging as a promising solution for accelerating various applications in the embedded system domain. However, in this context, so far, comprehensive studies that combine theoretical features of real-time task scheduling with practical runtime architectural characteristics have mostly been ignored. To fill this gap, in this paper we propose a real-time scheduling algorithm with the objective of minimizing the overall execution time under hardware resource constraints for heterogeneous CPU+FPGA architectures. In particular, we propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based technique for task allocation and scheduling. We then show how to implement a given scheduling on a practical CPU+FPGA system regarding current technology restrictions and validate our methodology using a practical RISC-V case-study. Our experiments demonstrate that performance gains of 40 % and area usage reductions of 67 % are possible compared to a full software and hardware execution, respectively.