A Design of Solution Architect for an Embedded System Application

A Design of Solution Architect for an Embedded System Application



A Design of Solution Architect for an Embedded System Application

Abstract

The recent spectacular progress in modern micro- and nano-electronic technology has enabled the implementation of complex information-processing systems on single chips and created a big push towards the development of various kinds of application-specific embedded and high-performance systems. Traditional applications can now be served much better and numerous new sorts of systems have become technologically feasible and economically justified, especially for applications that require miniaturization, high-performance, autonomous computing, and wireless or distant communication.

Introduction

System Design Approaches to Embedded Systems

Solution architect

On the other hand, however, this spectacular progress introduced unusual technology and system complexity. Increasingly complex and sophisticated embedded systems in telecommunications, consumer electronics, advanced machinery, signal, image and video processing, medical equipment, instrumentation, avionics, the military area and virtually all other areas of human activity are required to reliably perform real-time computations to extremely tight schedules with energy, power and area efficiency never demanded before. The computational demands of high-performance systems for scientific and engineering computation also grow rapidly. Moreover, the system and technology complexity, as well as the rapidly growing proliferation of microelectronic systems in the general consumer markets result in serious development and implementation challenges, such as the rapidly growing design productivity gap and development costs. There is a general consensus that the progress in microelectronic technology alone cannot guarantee satisfaction of the growing computational demands, physical requirements and economical challenges of most modern applications. (R. Jayaseelan, H. Liu, T. Mitra, 2006, 65-78)

Explanation

Opportunities created by modern technology can effectively be exploited only through adequate usage of efficient application-specific system architectures and circuit implementations exploiting more adequate concepts of computation, storage and communication. This requires effective and efficient design methods and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools for synthesizing the actual high-quality hardware platforms implementing the architectures, and for efficient mapping of the applications onto hardware platforms. The new system architectures and computation, storage and communication concepts, as well as, the new design methods and EDA-tools need to adequately address the problems discussed above. (R. Jayaseelan, H. Liu, T. Mitra, 2006, 65-78)

Standardisation of Embedded Systems

Numerous embedded system and scientific computation projects have demonstrated that heterogeneous reconfigurable systems, exploiting a mixture of traditional CPU-centric instruction-stream-based processing and decentralized parallel application-specific data-dominated processing, provide drastically higher performance and lower power consumption than traditional CPU-centric systems. Moreover, they do it at much lower costs and shorter times to market than non-reconfigurable hardware solutions. They also provide the flexibility that is often required for the engineering of modern robust and adaptive systems. Due to their heterogeneity, flexibility and potential for highly optimized application-specific instantiation, reconfigurable computing (RC) systems are adequate for a very broad class of applications across different industry sectors. For many application areas, the heterogeneous parallel reconfigurable systems can be even several orders of magnitude faster, while consuming several times less power than the traditional CPU-based systems

Need of enabling development technology

What prevents the reconfigurable ...