| Summary: | Integrated systems become larger and more complicated every day while time to market is shortened. Due to this, there is a need for flexible hardware platforms that use programmable logic not only for custom hardware but also for realizing embedded processors. This thesis aims to select a suitable, FPGA targeted, soft processor core and adapt the real-time operating system OSEck to run on the selected target. A study of possibilities to integrate setup and configuration of OSEck into the processor’s IDE is also performed. Studies of OSEck and the two processor candidates MicroBlaze and Nios II have been performed. The processor study showed that MicroBlaze and Nios II have a very similar architecture and both are suitable to host OSEck. MicroBlaze was chosen as target processor mainly because of more available documentation regarding operating system integration. Performance and footprint was measured with OSEck on MicroBlaze. The performance figures indicate that MicroBlaze can not be expected to have the same processing power as hard processors but works well as a control processor. To achieve high application performance, custom hardware accelerators can be connected. Integration investigations and tests have been performed with the goal of making an interface that conforms to the normal MicroBlaze design flow. OSEck has been successfully adapted to run on MicroBlaze and integration in the development environment is possible although some steps have to be done manually. Alternative integration options are discussed.
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