Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips

9.1. Introduction and Motivation

System-on-chip (SoC) architectures are being increasingly employed to solve a diverse spectrum of problems in the embedded and mobile systems domain. The resulting increase in the complexity of applications ported into SoC architectures places a tremendous burden on the computational resources required to deliver the required functionality. An emerging architectural solution places multiple processor cores on a single chip to manage the computational requirements. Such a multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) architecture has several advantages over a conventional strategy that employs a single, more powerful (but complex) processor on the chip. First, the design of an on-chip multiprocessor composed of multiple ...