Concepts of Communication and Synchronization in FPGA-Based Embedded Multiprocessor Systems
David Antonio‐Torres · InTech eBooks · 2012
The advent of deep submicron (DSM) technologies has driven the evolution of very large scale of integration (VLSI) chip design to new frontiers. In the early days, digital system design was tackled as an integration of discrete systems in a printed circuit board (PCB), the so-called jelly-bean design (Maxfield, 2004). If the complexity of the task was large, the resulting PCB was expected to be full packed with discrete components, thus pressing the designers with concerns such as area, power consumption, speed, etc. The further shrinking dimensions of the transistors allowed the designers to pack some similar discrete components together into a single one, thus alleviating design concerns about signal integrity, connectivity, etc. However, it was later found that some other aspects of design could also be alleviated if a larger number of the discrete components of the PCB were integrated into a single chip; this design strategy introduced the concept of System onChip (SoC); an SoC is then defined as an integrated circuit that incorporates on-chip memory, hardware and software components, where the software components are to be run by one or more microprocessors or digital signal processors (DSP) (Chang et al., 1999).