The increasing demand of processing a higher number of applications and related data on computing platforms has resulted in reliance on multi-/many-core chips as they facilitate parallel processing. However, there is a desire for these platforms to be energy-efficient and reliable, and they need to perform secure computations for the interest of the whole community. This book provides perspectives on the aforementioned aspects from leading researchers in terms of state-of-the-art contributions and upcoming trends.

This book describes scalable and near-optimal, processor-level design space exploration (DSE) methodologies. The authors present design methodologies for data storage and processing in real-time, cost-sensitive data-dominated embedded systems. Readers will be enabled to reduce time-to-market, while satisfying system requirements for performance, area, and energy consumption, thereby minimizing the overall cost of the final design.

Embedded computer systems are now everywhere: from alarm clocks to PDAs, from mobile phones to cars, almost all the devices we use are controlled by embedded computers. An important class of embedded computer systems is that of hard real-time systems, which have to fulfill strict timing requirements. As real-time systems become more complex, they are often implemented using distributed heterogeneous architectures. Analysis and Synthesis of Distributed Real-Time Embedded Systems addresses the design of real-time applications implemented using distributed heterogeneous architectures. The systems are heterogeneous not only in terms of hardware components, but also in terms of communication protocols and scheduling policies. Regarding this last aspect, time-driven and event-driven systems, as well as a combination of the two, are considered. Such systems are used in many application areas like automotive electronics, real-time multimedia, avionics, medical equipment, and factory systems. The proposed analysis and synthesis techniques derive optimized implementations that fulfill the imposed design constraints. An important part of the implementation process is the synthesis of the communication infrastructure, which has a significant impact on the overall system performance and cost. Analysis and Synthesis of Distributed Real-Time Embedded Systems considers the mapping and scheduling tasks within an incremental design process. To reduce the time-to-market of products, the design of real-time systems seldom starts from scratch. Typically, designers start from an already existing system, running certain applications, and the design problem is to implement new functionality on top of this system. Supporting such an incremental design process provides a high degree of flexibility, and can result in important reductions of design costs. STRONGAnalysis and Synthesis of Distributed Real-Time Embedded Systems will be of interest to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, researchers and designers involved in the field of embedded systems.

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 efficient. 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 configurable processing cores and customized hardware components, integrated on a single chip. This study targets such multiprocessor embedded systems and strives to develop algorithms, methods, and tools to deal with a number of fundamental problems which are encountered by the system designers during the early design stages.

This book serves as a reference for researchers and designers in Embedded Systems who need to explore design alternatives. It provides a design space exploration methodology for the analysis of system characteristics and the selection of the most appropriate architectural solution to satisfy requirements in terms of performance, power consumption, number of required resources, etc. Coverage focuses on the design of complex multimedia applications, where the choice of the optimal design alternative in terms of application/architecture pair is too complex to be pursued through a full search comparison, especially because of the multi-objective nature of the designer’s goal, the simulation time required and the number of parameters of the multi-core architecture to be optimized concurrently.

Ubiquitous in today's consumer-driven society, embedded systems use microprocessors that are hidden in our everyday products and designed to perform specific tasks. Effective use of these embedded systems requires engineers to be proficient in all phases of this effort, from planning, design, and analysis to manufacturing and marketing.Taking a sys