Abstract
Long-term trend in semiconductor development has been integration of larger and larger systems on a single chip. It has been governed by Moore’s law in terms of integration capabilities and double increase of the number of transistors on a chip every 12–24 months. At the same time this has also led to the increasing raw computation power on a single chip. However, all those transistors can’t be used to achieve faster and more powerful processors due to architectural and power limitations. Rather, the development has taken another direction towards systems on chip which consists of many processors or processing elements, sometimes tens or hundreds of such elements, with a clear trend towards chips which will have thousands of processors. One of the main reasons for this trend is that those processors are simpler, easier to implement and work at lower frequencies than high performance processors, thus they are less power and energy demanding. However, the new approach, which is often referred to as multiple processor (or multiprocessor) systems on chip (MPSoC) faces many challenges. Among them most notable are related to the selection of the type of processing elements (e.g. general purpose vs. application-specific, uniform vs. heterogeneous), selection of interconnect structures and system architecture (e.g. networks on chip vs. circuit interconnect vs. buses), life-time of the processing elements (static or dynamic or reconfigurable), run-time support (operating systems or customized), design flow and tools support (e.g. traditional programming languages vs. concurrent languages). Many new architectures have emerged with a claim of their advantages over others in at least specific application domains. The new approaches are mostly based on concentration on certain features (e.g. architecture, run-time support or languages) but not many of them look at the big picture and design flow that will ensure more consistency and better linkages between those features.
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Radojevic, I., Salcic, Z. (2011). Heterogeneous Reactive Architectures of Embedded Systems. In: Embedded Systems Design Based on Formal Models of Computation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1594-3_7
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