Embedded systems technologies for application-specific architecture platforms

Summary form only given. The paper addresses the emerging architectural platform approach to improve time-to-market, and the design automation technologies needed to support it. An experimental network processing platform developed at STMicroelectronics is presented to illustrate the concept. Key platform automation challenges are introduced. A powerful embedded software development toolset is required to support high-level descriptions of the algorithms running on the processor. This ensures time-to-market, code readability and easy portability. Moreover, the toolset must support the rapid platform and/or processor configuration. We have based the network processor's toolset on STMicroelectronics internal "FlexWare" embedded software development environment. We present the technical characteristics of FlexWare technologies and demonstrate their application on the ST experimental network processor. In particular, we emphasize the architecture exploration capability that is supported by the retargetability of the FlexWare tools.