ABSTRACT
Modern electronic systems consist of a fairly heterogeneous set of components. Today, a single system can be constituted by a hardware platform, frequently composed of a mixture of analog and digital components, and by several software application layers. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the main concepts related to heterogeneous multi-processor embedded systems, describing their general architecture and their application fields, and identifying the criticalities of their design. It addresses the definition of a set of metrics, providing quantitative information useful to take system-level decisions such as architectural selection and HW/SW partitioning. The book addresses the problem of estimating software and hardware performance at a high-level of abstraction, necessary to enable design space exploration, while maintaining an acceptable level of accuracy.
