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RTCSA
2005
IEEE

An On-Chip Garbage Collection Coprocessor for Embedded Real-Time Systems

14 years 5 months ago
An On-Chip Garbage Collection Coprocessor for Embedded Real-Time Systems
Garbage collection considerably increases programmer productivity and software quality. However, it is difficult to implement garbage collection both efficiently and suitably for real-time systems. Today, garbage collection is exclusively realized in software and either fails to guarantee a small upper bound for pause times or suffers from considerable synchronization overhead. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an on-chip garbage collection coprocessor that closely cooperates with the main processor. The benefits of this configuration include low garbage collection overhead, low-cost synchronization of collector and application programs, and hard real-time capabilities. We successfully realized the garbage collection coprocessor along with a pipelined RISC processor on a single FPGA. Performance measurements on the prototype show that the longest pauses caused by the garbage collector are less than 500 clock cycles and that the total runtime overhead is as...
Matthias Meyer
Added 25 Jun 2010
Updated 25 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2005
Where RTCSA
Authors Matthias Meyer
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