A systematic approach to exploring embedded system architectures at multiple abstraction levels

TLDR

Embedded systems’ complexity demands early modeling and simulation to explore design choices across a vast design space. This paper presents Sesame, a framework that offers high‑level modeling and simulation tools for evaluating and exploring heterogeneous embedded system architectures. Sesame guides designers through a systematic trajectory—from selecting candidate architectures, applying analytical modeling and multi‑objective optimization, to simulating them in a system‑level environment that supports multi‑abstraction‑level exploration while preserving high‑level application specifications. A motion‑JPEG encoder case study demonstrates Sesame’s ability to traverse this exploration trajectory and evaluate architectural performance.

Abstract

The sheer complexity of today's embedded systems forces designers to start with modeling and simulating system components and their interactions in the very early design stages. It is therefore imperative to have good tools for exploring a wide range of design choices, especially during the early design stages, where the design space is at its largest. This paper presents an overview of the Sesame framework, which provides high-level modeling and simulation methods and tools for system-level performance evaluation and exploration of heterogeneous embedded systems. More specifically, we describe Sesame's modeling methodology and trajectory. It takes a designer systematically along the path from selecting candidate architectures, using analytical modeling and multiobjective optimization, to simulating these candidate architectures with our system-level simulation environment. This simulation environment subsequently allows for architectural exploration at different levels of abstraction while maintaining high-level and architecture-independent application specifications. We illustrate all these aspects using a case study in which we traverse Sesame's exploration trajectory for a motion-JPEG encoder application.