Recent changes in technology scaling have made power dissipation today's major performance limiter. As a result, designers struggle to meet performance requirements under stringent power budgets. At the same time, the traditional solution to power efficiency, application specific designs, has become prohibitively expensive due to increasing nonrecurring engineering (NRE) costs. Most concerning are the development costs for design, validation, and software for new systems. In this thesis, we argue that one can harness ideas of reconfigurable designs to build a design framework that can generate semi-custom chips --- a Chip Generator. A domain specific chip generator codifies the designer knowledge and design trade-offs into a template that can be used to create many different chips. Like reconfigurable designs, these systems fix the top level system architecture, amortizing software and validation and design costs, and enabling a rich system simulation environment for application developers. Meanwhile, below the top level, the developer can "program" the individual inner components of the architecture. Unlike reconfigurable chips, a generator "compiles" the program to create a customized chip. This compilation process occurs at elaboration time --- long before silicon is fabricated. The result is a framework that enables more customization of the generated chip at the architectural level, because additional components and logic can be added if the customization process requires it. At the same time this framework does not introduce inefficiency at the circuit level because unneeded circuit overheads are not taped out. Using Chip Generators, we argue, will enable design houses to design a wide family of chips using a cost structure similar to that of designing a single chip --- potentially saving tens of millions of dollars --- while enabling per-application customization and optimization.

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

This book describes analytical models and estimation methods to enhance performance estimation of pipelined multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). A framework is introduced for both design-time and run-time optimizations. For design space exploration, several algorithms are presented to minimize the area footprint of a pipelined MPSoC under a latency or a throughput constraint. A novel adaptive pipelined MPSoC architecture is described, where idle processors are transitioned into low-power states at run-time to reduce energy consumption. Multi-mode pipelined MPSoCs are introduced, where multiple pipelined MPSoCs optimized separately are merged into a single pipelined MPSoC, enabling further reduction of the area footprint by sharing the processors and communication buffers. Readers will benefit from the authors’ combined use of analytical models, estimation methods and exploration algorithms and will be enabled to explore billions of design points in a few minutes.

Current multimedia and telecom applications require complex, heterogeneous multiprocessor system on chip (MPSoC) architectures with specific communication infrastructure in order to achieve the required performance. Heterogeneous MPSoC includes different types of processing units (DSP, microcontroller, ASIP) and different communication schemes (fast links, non standard memory organization and access). Programming an MPSoC requires the generation of efficient software running on MPSoC from a high level environment, by using the characteristics of the architecture. This task is known to be tedious and error prone, because it requires a combination of high level programming environments with low level software design. This book gives an overview of concepts related to embedded software design for MPSoC. It details a full software design approach, allowing systematic, high-level mapping of software applications on heterogeneous MPSoC. This approach is based on gradual refinement of hardware/software interfaces and simulation models allowing to validate the software at different abstraction levels. This book combines Simulink for high level programming and SystemC for the low level software development. This approach is illustrated with multiple examples of application software and MPSoC architectures that can be used for deep understanding of software design for MPSoC.

A Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) is the key component for complex applications. These applications put huge pressure on memory, communication devices and computing units. This book, presented in two volumes – Architectures and Applications – therefore celebrates the 20th anniversary of MPSoC, an interdisciplinary forum that focuses on multi-core and multi-processor hardware and software systems. It is this interdisciplinarity which has led to MPSoC bringing together experts in these fields from around the world, over the last two decades. Multi-Processor System-on-Chip 1 covers the key components of MPSoC: processors, memory, interconnect and interfaces. It describes advance features of these components and technologies to build efficient MPSoC architectures. All the main components are detailed: use of memory and their technology, communication support and consistency, and specific processor architectures for general purposes or for dedicated applications.

This book introduces a novel framework for accurately modeling the errors in nanoscale CMOS technology and developing a smooth tool flow at high-level design abstractions to estimate and mitigate the effects of errors. The book presents novel techniques for high-level fault simulation and reliability estimation as well as architecture-level and system-level fault tolerant designs. It also presents a survey of state-of-the-art problems and solutions, offering insights into reliability issues in digital design and their cross-layer countermeasures.

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.

A Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) is the key component for complex applications. These applications put huge pressure on memory, communication devices and computing units. This book, presented in two volumes – Architectures and Applications – therefore celebrates the 20th anniversary of MPSoC, an interdisciplinary forum that focuses on multi-core and multi-processor hardware and software systems. It is this interdisciplinarity which has led to MPSoC bringing together experts in these fields from around the world, over the last two decades. Multi-Processor System-on-Chip 2 covers application-specific MPSoC design, including compilers and architecture exploration. This second volume describes optimization methods, tools to optimize and port specific applications on MPSoC architectures. Details on compilation, power consumption and wireless communication are also presented, as well as examples of modeling frameworks and CAD tools. Explanations of specific platforms for automotive and real-time computing are also included.

This book explains for readers how 3D chip stacks promise to increase the level of on-chip integration, and to design new heterogeneous semiconductor devices that combine chips of different integration technologies (incl. sensors) in a single package of the smallest possible size. The authors focus on heterogeneous 3D integration, addressing some of the most important challenges in this emerging technology, including contactless, optics-based, and carbon-nanotube-based 3D integration, as well as signal-integrity and thermal management issues in copper-based 3D integration. Coverage also includes the 3D heterogeneous integration of power sources, photonic devices, and non-volatile memories based on new materials systems.