ABSTRACT
In the twenty-rst century, embedded systems have become ubiquitous and the turnover in products has become erce. Product design-cycle times and product lifetimes are now measured in months. At the same time, board-level embedded microprocessor and on-chip processor core use have skyrocketed. Multicore processor designs are becoming common. Consequently, design teams need a way to perform rapid design-space exploration (DSE) of programmable processor architectures to meet the pressures of shrinking time-to-market and ever-shrinking product lifetimes.
