SoC reconfigurable computational architectures design
Last years’ development of computer technologies is basically defined by quantity and variety growth of embedded and mobile applications. Requirements and design process of such systems considerably differs from personal computers, server and communication equipment. It is required to solve problems of computers’ close integration with environment - with technical, physical or biological systems, increasingly raise specialization of functions to provide further miniaturization and reliability increase.
It has led to intensive development of a hardware-technological platform for application-specific computer systems design – “Systems on chip” (SoC). Today SoC becomes the basic platform for mobile and embedded applications, gradually overshadowing "classic" microprocessor architectures.
The problem of architectural model choice for SoC is complicated and versatile, as there is a sharp growth of quantity and variety of applications for this kind of embedded systems. In the field of computational models there are about ten most popular models for the organization of multiple computational processes, which are claimed and scientifically proved. Regarding embedded systems architectures, the situation is different: developers are guided by ready-to-use platforms, not always unambiguously connecting a problem being solved with these platform’s parameters, or use their own groundwork of various quality.
The hardware-intensive nature of SoC computational platform and specific requirements to its usage briefly described above, limit the possibility to use models, architectures, templates, techniques and design tools developed for "classic" microprocessor systems. The problem of search of architectural model, which is more adapted for SoC peculiarities, is set to researchers.