Introduction

Abstract

In consumer electronics and telecommunications high product volumes are increasingly going along with short life-times. Driven by the advances in semiconductor technology combined with the need for new applications like digital TV and wireless broadband communications, the amount of system functionality realized on a single chip is growing enormously. Higher integration and thus increasing miniaturization have led to a shift from using distributed hardware components towards heterogeneous system-on-chip (SOC) designs [1]. Due to the complexity introduced by such SOC designs and time-to-market constraints, the designer’s productivity has become the vital factor for successful products. Today, development time is often more valuable than MOPS (million operations per second) and the ratio is rising (see figure 1.1). For this reason a growing amount of system functions and signal processing algorithms is implemented in software rather than in hardware by employing embedded processor cores. The programmability helps to raise the designer’s productivity and the flexibility of software allows late design changes and provides a high grade of reusability, thus shortening the design cycles.