Invited: The case for Embedded Scalable Platforms

Heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) architectures are emerging as a fundamental computing platform across a variety of domains, from mobile to cloud computing. Heterogeneity, however, increases design complexity in terms of hardware-software interactions, access to shared resources, and diminished regularity of the design. Embedded Scalable Platforms are a novel approach to SoC design and programming that addresses these design-complexity challenges by combining an architecture and a methodology. The flexible socketed architecture simplifies the integration of heterogeneous components by balancing regularity and specialization. The companion methodology raises the level of abstraction to system-level design, thus promoting closer collaboration among software programmers and hardware engineers. The architecture is supported by a scalable communication infrastructure. The methodology leverages compositional design-space exploration with high-level synthesis. The case for Embedded Scalable Platforms is made based on experiments on the development of various full-system prototypes and experience in teaching these concepts in a new graduate course.