Conclusions

Abstract

The design of embedded Systems-on-Chip (SOC) is influenced by several evolutionary trends, such as the increase in design complexity made possible through shrinking features sizes coupled with larger die sizes for chips. On the other hand, the increasing complexity of building blocks leads to a revolutionary challenge in the emerging system design process that combines complex Intellectual-Property (IP) library blocks to create specialized embedded SOC under tight time-to-market deadlines. Such IP libraries frequently consist of pre-designed mega-cells such as processor cores and memories; several new architectural and optimization issues arise in the process of incorporation of these complex components in application-specific embedded systems. In this book, we described techniques for incorporating memory architectures in such embedded systems that contain both custom-synthesized hardware, as well as programmable processor cores.