On the design space exploration through the Hellfire Framework

Embedded systems have faced dramatic and extensive changes throughout the past years leading to each more complex designs. Thus, this article presents the Hellfire Framework, which implements a design space exploration tool based on two basic steps: explore and refine. The tool leads the designer through three main different levels of abstraction: (i) application level; (ii) OS level, and; (iii) hardware architecture level. In the application level, the initial input is a task graph that represents the application’s behavior. The resulting application (divided in tasks) uses the OS we provide (and its system calls) to perform varied operations. The OS itself can be mainly configured in terms of real-time scheduling and memory occupation. Finally, the hardware architecture level allows to choose parameters regarding the processor frequency and communication infrastructure. The framework guides the designer through these levels in an explore and refine fashion so that, from a high level description of the application, the entire platform can be assembled with proper design exploration. Results show the exploration and refinement steps in the three levels we propose in different applications for MPSoC-based systems.