Overview

This cutting-edge book reviews the challenges and difficulties encountered in the design of reconfigurable Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). Reconfiguration is becoming an important part of System-on-Chip design to cope with the increasing demands for simultaneous flexibility and computational power. The book focuses on system level design issues for reconfigurable SoCs, and provides information on reconfiguration aspects of complex SoCs and how they can be implemented in practice. Part I provides background information and requirements on reconfigurable technologies and systems. Part II identifies existing methodological gaps, and introduces a design flow for developing reconfigurable Systems-on-Chip. The high level part of the design flow can be covered by two C++ based methodologies: one based on SystemC and one based on OCAPI-XL, both including appropriate extensions to handle reconfiguration issues. Part III of the book presents reconfigurable SoCs from the perspective of the designer, through three indicative case studies from the wireless and multimedia communication domain.