ABSTRACT
In consumer electronics and telecommunications high product volumes are increasingly going along with short life-times. Driven by the advances in semiconductor technology combined with the need for new
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applications like digital TV and wireless broadband communications, the amount of system functionality realized on a single chip is growing enormously. Higher integration and thus increasing miniaturization have led to a shift from using distributed hardware components towards heterogeneous system-on-chip (SOC) designs [1]. Due to the complexity introduced by such SOC designs and time-to-market constraints, the designer’s productivity has become the vital factor for successful products. For this reason a growing amount of system functions and signal processing algorithms is implemented in software rather than in hardware by employing embedded processor cores.
