Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips

14.6. The Panacea/Promise of Platform-Based Design

In order to emphasize systematic reuse, lower development cost, minimize development risks, and reduce time-to-market, by spinning off quick derivatives, another recent trend is to exploit the benefits of a platform-based design. The basic idea behind the platform-based approach is to avoid designing a chip from scratch; some portion of the chip’s architecture, as Richard Goering [605] points out, is predefined for a specific type of application. Usually, there is the hardware architectural platform comprising one or more processors, programmable IP cores, a memory subsystem, a communication network, and an input output (I/O) subsystem; an application programming interface (API) then provides ...