Abstract
Wearable equipment in recent years has been rapid development. But the hardware manufacturing complexity and the high cost is a real problem. This paper introduces a microprocessor cluster with both hardware design principle and related distributed software design methods. This cluster has the characteristics of low cost, high reliability, flexible hardware and software system structure, low power consumption, simple equipment manufacturing process and so on, especially suitable for wearable equipment. This article discusses the hardware and software design methods in detail, as well as the complete process of the across-node communication module. In order to verify the principle of the design, we created a prototype test machine which consists of an ARM Cortex-M4 core microprocessor and 10 ARM Cortex-M0 core microprocessors through the UART serial interconnection to form a star network and carried out an experimental about the ECG feature extraction operation. Experimental results show that the performance of the cluster can be compared with a Cortex-A7 high-performance embedded processor, but the microprocessor cluster system is less expensive and has a superior cost-effective.