Experiences with system level design for consumer ICs

The continuing trend towards higher integration densities of ICs makes systems-on-a-chip possible. For well defined application domains "silicon platforms" must be defined which combine efficient implementations with programmability. Platforms are heterogeneous reconfigurable multiprocessor architectures supporting a variety of communication and computation models. As a consequence designers are facing a large architecture space with new possibilities for new architectures. To exploit these opportunities a better understanding of system level architectures is necessary. A first step in this direction is to learn from design exercises. Eventually this may lead towards a system level design method.