'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
There is increasing pressure to optimize Internet
of things (IoT) low-end devices. The ever-growing number of
requirements and constraints is pushing towards maximizing
performance and real-time, but simultaneously minimizing power
consumption, form factor, and memory footprint. This has
motivated the adoption of Field-Programmable Gate Array
(FPGA) technology to accelerate computing-intensive workloads
in hardware. However, and despite the ongoing trend of migrating
application-level tasks to hardware, recently, the offload of
system software such as operating system (OS) services has
received little attention. This paper presents CHAMELIOT, a
framework for FPGA-based IoT platforms that provides agnostic
hardware acceleration to OS services by leveraging RISC-V
technology. CHAMELIOT allows for developers to run unmodified
applications in a set of well-established IoT OSes. Currently, the
framework has support for RIOT, Zephyr, and FreeRTOS. The
evaluation showed that latency and determinism can be enhanced
up to 10x while the system’s performance can be increased to
nearly 200%. CHAMELIOT will be open-sourced.This work has been supported by FCT -Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020 and SFRH/BD/146678/2019
