Virtualization technology starts becoming more and more widespread in the embedded systems arena, driven by the upward trend for integrating multiple environments into the same hardware platform. Existent standard software-based virtualization solutions have been shown to negatively impact the overall system, especially in performance, memory footprint and determinism.

This work aims to develop a hardware-software co-design framework for the development of new generation of embedded applications. The TrustZone technology will be exploited to implement a secure virtualization architecture that allows the execution of a General-Purpose Operating System (GPOS) side-by-side with a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) in a multicore configuration. Some RTOS services will be offloaded to hardware to enable simultaneous improvements on both performance and determinism.

Instead of focusing on a concrete application, it is intended to provide a complete framework that can be used to accelerate a vast number of distinct applications in different embedded systems sectors - industrial, automotive, medical, etc. The aim is to show the usability and applicability of the framework through a use case application for the monitoring and control of an inverted pendulum.