Embedded processors and systems: Architectural issues and solutions for emerging applications

The design of embedded systems concerns hardware, software and mixed hardware-software issues. The increasing demand of complex consumer applications, such as the management of multimedia content and value-added services provided via mobile devices [1], is pushing towards the development of new architectures, operating systems and development environments. Among the most promising architectures, there are heterogeneous systems on chip. In a typical design, such systems integrate microprocessor(s)/microcontroller(s) and DSP cores. In them, microprocessor(s)/microcontroller(s) are devoted to the execution of the control, coordination and interfacing parts of the application, DSP are devoted to the support of numerically intensive tasks. Examples of this tendency can be verified in some commercial products such as the Texas-Instrument OMAP or the Atmel Diopsis families, comprising integrated ARM/DSP cores [2,3]. This scenario requires studies on the chip architecture (e.g. how many units, which kind of units, in which way they communicate, how the chips are interconnected: these are some of the open questions [6–8]) and on the paradigms for synchronization/communication at hardware and software level. In addition, advances in development tools for the management and exploitation of the cross-interaction among cores are highly