Modern embedded systems come with contradictory design constraints. On one
hand, these systems often target mass production and battery-based devices, and
therefore should be cheap and power efcient. On the other hand, they still need
to show high (sometimes real-time) performance, and often support multiple applications
and standards which requires high programmability. This wide spectrum
of design requirements leads to complex heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures
– consisting of several types of processors from fully programmable
microprocessors to congurable processing cores and customized hardware components,
integrated on a single chip. These multiprocessor SoCs have now become
the keystones in the development of late embedded systems, devices such as digital
televisions, game consoles, car audio/navigation systems, and 3G mobile phones.