Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips

10.1. Introduction

With the increasing complexity of embedded systems and the capacity of modern silicon technology, there is a trend toward heterogeneous architectures consisting of several programmable as well as dedicated processors, implemented on a single chip, known as systems-on-chips (SoCs). As more applications are implemented in software that in turn is growing larger and more complex, dedicated operating systems will have to be introduced as an interface layer between the application software and the hardware platform [432]. Global analysis of such heterogeneous systems is a big challenge. Typically, two aspects are of interest when one is considering global analysis: the system functionality, in general, and the system timing and ...