Traditionally, embedded applications in the multimedia, wireless communications
or networking domain have been implemented on Printed Circuit Boards
(PCBs). PCB systems are composed of discrete Integrated Circuits (ICs) like
General Purpose Processors, Digital Signal Processors, Application Specific
Integrated Circuits, memories, and further peripherals. The communication
between the discrete processing elements and memories is realized by shared
bus architectures.
The ongoing progress in silicon technology fosters the transition from boardlevel
integration towards System-on-Chip (SoC) implementations of embedded
applications. According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors
[2], by the end of the decade SoCs will grow to 4 billion transistors
running at 10 GHz and operating below one volt. Already today multiple heterogeneous processing elements and memories can be integrated on a single
chip to increase performance and to reduce cost and improve energy efficiency
[3].
The growing potential for silicon integration is even outpaced by the amount
of functionality incorporated into embedded devices from all kinds of application
domains. This trend originates from the tremendous increase in features as
well as the multitude of co-existing standards. The resulting functional complexity
clearly promotes Software enabled solutions to achieve the required
flexibility and cope with the demanding time-to-market conditions. However,
the stringent energy efficiency constraints of mobile applications and cost sensitive consumer devices prohibit the use of general purpose processors. Instead,
the tight cost and performance requirements of versatile embedded systems lead
to application specific heterogeneous multi-processor architectures [4, 5].