NanoBoot: A Field-Programmable Gate Array/System-on-Chip Hardware Boot Loader for IoT Devices

This paper presents a new boot loader scheme for embedded devices with file system support built as a hardware module. The work focuses on improving the boot loader hardware and the possibility of carrying out a full boot-up process from the dedicated on-chip hardware, using a light file system to store an operating system kernel. To do so, the new full-hardware boot loader is integrated into two Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) System-on-Chip (SoC), capable of launching a Linux kernel from a formatted removable media.