Abstract
High-performance and low-power VLIW DSP processors are increasingly deployed in embedded mobile devices to process video and multimedia applications. Also, dual-core embedded processors which combine a MPU and a DSP are widely used in embedded systems to provide powerful computation. As there are diversified applications concurrently used for such systems, resource and communication management for dual-core embedded system become a focus of recent research efforts. To manage resource, we need operating systems for both processors. And there are many popular operating systems for MPU. However, because of special architecture, DSP needs specific operating system to help it manage resource. Besides, the dualcore embedded system needs friendly and efficient communication mechanize to help programmers develop dual-core applications easily. In this thesis, we address the microkernel design issue for a VLIW DSP processor, known as PAC architectures. We describe the detailed design of scheduler, context switch, inter-process communication, and synchronization of our microkernel system. This is known as pCore. In addition, we propose several dual-core communication model for PAC DSP and ARM based on pCore and Linux. These mechanizes can help programmers develop dual-core applications. Also, we show several dual-core JPEG encoders based on the dual-core communication models. Our experiments give the performance of pCore. It also shows the performance speedup of dual-core JPEG encoder. This is the first known implementation for dual-core systems native developed in Taiwan.