A System Framework for the Design of Embedded Software Targeting Heterogeneous Multi-core SoCs

Abstract

Embedded appliances designers rely on Heterogeneous Multi-Core System-on-Chips (HMC-SoC) to provide the computing power required by modern applications. Due to the inherent complexity of this kind of platform, the development of speci¿c system architectures is not considered as an option to provide low-level services to an application. Hence, the software is built either from scratch - when the software’s requirements are not too high - or over a general-purpose operating system, leading to performance and memory usage trade-offs. Our contribution is a component-based system framework that provides high-level system services for embedded software applications with few impacts on the memory usage and ¿nal performances, thanks to strong interfaces that enable the reuse of existing software elements and facilitate the support of multiple hardware platforms. The ef¿ciency of our approach is demonstrated on an existing MC-SoC.