Modern electronic systems consist of a fairly heterogeneous set of components. Today, a single system can be constituted by a hardware platform, frequently composed of a mix of analog and digital components, and by several software application layers. The hardware can include several heterogeneous microprocessors (e.g. GPP, DSP, GPU, etc.), dedicated ICs (ASICs and/or FPGAs), memories, a set of local connections between the system components, and some interfaces between the system and the environment (sensors, actuators, etc.). Therefore, on the one hand, multi-processor embedded systems are capable of meeting the demand of processing power and flexibility of complex applications. On the other hand, such systems are very complex to design and optimize, so that the design methodology plays a major role in determining the success of the products. For these reasons, to cope with the increasing system complexity, the approaches typically used today are oriented towards co-design methodologies working at the higher levels of abstraction. Unfortunately, such methodologies are typically customized for the specific application, suffer of a lack of generality and still need a considerable effort when real-size project are envisioned. Therefore, there is still the need for a general methodology able to support the designer during the high-level steps of a co-design flow, enabling an effective design space exploration before tackling the low-level steps and thus committing to the final technology. This should prevent costly redesign loops.In such a context, the work described in this book, composed of two parts, aims at providing models, methodologies and tools to support each step of the co-design flow of embedded systems implemented by exploiting heterogeneous multi-processor architectures mapped on distributed systems, as well as fully integrated onto a single chip.

This title serves as an introduction ans reference for the field, with the papers that have shaped the hardware/software co-design since its inception in the early 90s.

Modern system-on-chip (SoC) design shows a clear trend toward integration of multiple processor cores on a single chip. Designing a multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSOC) requires an understanding of the various design styles and techniques used in the multiprocessor. Understanding the application area of the MPSOC is also critical to making proper tradeoffs and design decisions. Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips covers both design techniques and applications for MPSOCs. Design topics include multiprocessor architectures, processors, operating systems, compilers, methodologies, and synthesis algorithms, and application areas covered include telecommunications and multimedia. The majority of the chapters were collected from presentations made at the International Workshop on Application-Specific Multi-Processor SoC held over the past two years. The workshop assembled internationally recognized speakers on the range of topics relevant to MPSOCs. After having refined their material at the workshop, the speakers are now writing chapters and the editors are fashioning them into a unified book by making connections between chapters and developing common terminology. *Examines several different architectures and the constraints imposed on them *Discusses scheduling, real-time operating systems, and compilers *Analyzes design trade-off and decisions in telecommunications and multimedia applications

System-Level Design Techniques for Energy-Efficient Embedded Systems addresses the development and validation of co-synthesis techniques that allow an effective design of embedded systems with low energy dissipation. The book provides an overview of a system-level co-design flow, illustrating through examples how system performance is influenced at various steps of the flow including allocation, mapping, and scheduling. The book places special emphasis upon system-level co-synthesis techniques for architectures that contain voltage scalable processors, which can dynamically trade off between computational performance and power consumption. Throughout the book, the introduced co-synthesis techniques, which target both single-mode systems and emerging multi-mode applications, are applied to numerous benchmarks and real-life examples including a realistic smart phone.

This book presents a methodology and the associated tooling for enabling design space exploration as well as a successive refinement flow for the design of optimized MP-SoCs with a high degree of automation.