Abstract
Conflicting trends can be observed in the hardware industry for embedded systems, which are presently being required to run several different applications with distinctive behaviors, becoming more heterogeneous. At the same time, users also demand these systems to operate during an extended period of time, creating extra pressure for energy efficiency. While transistor size shrinks, processors are getting more sensitive to fabrication defects, aging and soft faults, which increase the costs associated with their production. To make this situation even worse, in most of the time designers are stuck with the need to sustain binary compatibility, in order to support the huge amount of embedded software already deployed.In this challenging context, adaptability in multiple levels is the key for sustaining the aforementioned requirements. Embedded systems must adapt themselves to better execute their applications with the lowest possible power dissipation, while respecting their original functional behavior and their set of non-functional constraints (such as maximum execution time or power budget). They also must adapt when scheduling these different applications to be executed on their distinct hardware components, depending on availability, performance requirements and energy budget; or still adapt themselves to keep working when a defect comes from the fabrication process, or when a fault appears at runtime. High resilience allows increased yield and reduced costs, even with aggressive scaling or by the use of unreliable technologies or operation in harsh environments.This chapter overviews the toughest challenges that embedded software and hardware engineers face when designing new devices and systems, and how these systems are expected to grow in complexity in the forthcoming years. In the end of this chapter it will become clear how only aggressive adaptability can tackle these conflicting design constraints in a sustainable fashion, and still allow huge fabrication volumes. Each challenge is developed in details throughout the next chapters, providing an extensive literature review as well as settling a promising research agenda for adaptability.
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Beck, A.C.S., Lisbôa, C.A.L., Carro, L., Nazar, G.L., Pereira, M.M., Ferreira, R.R. (2013). Adaptability: The Key for Future Embedded Systems. In: Beck, A., Lang Lisbôa, C., Carro, L. (eds) Adaptable Embedded Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1746-0_1
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