Heterogeneous MPSoC Technology for Modern Cyber-physical Systems

Spectacular progress in microelectronics and information technology created a big stimulus towards development of advanced embedded and cyber-physical systems, but also introduced unusual silicon and system complexity and heterogeneity. Moreover, many modern cyber-physical applications demand guaranteed (ultra-) high performance and/or (ultra-) low energy consumption, as well as high dependability, safety and security. This all combined results in numerous serious system development challenges. To overcome these challenges a substantial system and design methodology adaptation is necessary. This paper focuses on the system technology for the modern highly-demanding cyber-physical systems. After brief introduction to modern cyber-physical systems and consideration of several serious challenges of their design, the paper discusses the heterogeneous MPSoC technology needed to implement those systems. This MPSoC technology exploits heterogeneous computation and communication resources involving application-specific instruction-set processors, hardware accelerators, distributed parallel memories and hierarchical communication structures.