From basic architecture, interconnection, and parallelization to power optimization, this book provides a comprehensive description of emerging multicore systems-on-chip (MCSoCs) hardware and software design. Highlighting both fundamentals and advanced software and hardware design, it can serve as a primary textbook for advanced courses in MCSoCs design and embedded systems. The first three chapters introduce MCSoCs architectures, present design challenges and conventional design methods, and describe in detail the main building blocks of MCSoCs. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 discuss fundamental and advanced on-chip interconnection network technologies for multi and many core SoCs, enabling readers to understand the microarchitectures for on-chip routers and network interfaces that are essential in the context of latency, area, and power constraints. With the rise of multicore and many-core systems, concurrency is becoming a major issue in the daily life of a programmer. Thus, compiler and software development tools are critical in helping programmers create high-performance software. Programmers should make sure that their parallelized program codes will not cause race condition, memory-access deadlocks, or other faults that may crash their entire systems. As such, Chapter 7 describes a novel parallelizing compiler design for high-performance computing. Chapter 8 provides a detailed investigation of power reduction techniques for MCSoCs at component and network levels. It discusses energy conservation in general hardware design, and also in embedded multicore system components, such as CPUs, disks, displays and memories. Lastly, Chapter 9 presents a real embedded MCSoCs system design targeted for health monitoring in the elderly.

System on chips designs have evolved from fairly simple unicore, single memory designs to complex heterogeneous multicore SoC architectures consisting of a large number of IP blocks on the same silicon. To meet high computational demands posed by latest consumer electronic devices, most current systems are based on such paradigm, which represents a real revolution in many aspects in computing. The attraction of multicore processing for power reduction is compelling. By splitting a set of tasks among multiple processor cores, the operating frequency necessary for each core can be reduced, allowing to reduce the voltage on each core. Because dynamic power is proportional to the frequency and to the square of the voltage, we get a big gain, even though we may have more cores running. As more and more cores are integrated into these designs to share the ever increasing processing load, the main challenges lie in efficient memory hierarchy, scalable system interconnect, new programming paradigms, and efficient integration methodology for connecting such heterogeneous cores into a single system capable of leveraging their individual flexibility. Current design methods tend toward mixed HW/SW co-designs targeting multicore systems on-chip for specific applications. To decide on the lowest cost mix of cores, designers must iteratively map the device's functionality to a particular HW/SW partition and target architectures. In addition, to connect the heterogeneous cores, the architecture requires high performance complex communication architectures and efficient communication protocols, such as hierarchical bus, point-to-point connection, or Network-on-Chip. Software development also becomes far more complex due to the difficulties in breaking a single processing task into multiple parts that can be processed separately and then reassembled later. This reflects the fact that certain processor jobs cannot be easily parallelized to run concurrently on multiple processing cores and that load balancing between processing cores - especially heterogeneous cores - is very difficult.

From basic architecture, interconnection, and parallelization to power optimization, this book provides a comprehensive description of emerging multicore systems-on-chip (MCSoCs) hardware and software design. Highlighting both fundamentals and advanced software and hardware design, it can serve as a primary textbook for advanced courses in MCSoCs design and embedded systems. The first three chapters introduce MCSoCs architectures, present design challenges and conventional design methods, and describe in detail the main building blocks of MCSoCs. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 discuss fundamental and advanced on-chip interconnection network technologies for multi and many core SoCs, enabling readers to understand the microarchitectures for on-chip routers and network interfaces that are essential in the context of latency, area, and power constraints. With the rise of multicore and many-core systems, concurrency is becoming a major issue in the daily life of a programmer. Thus, compiler and software development tools are critical in helping programmers create high-performance software. Programmers should make sure that their parallelized program codes will not cause race condition, memory-access deadlocks, or other faults that may crash their entire systems. As such, Chapter 7 describes a novel parallelizing compiler design for high-performance computing. Chapter 8 provides a detailed investigation of power reduction techniques for MCSoCs at component and network levels. It discusses energy conservation in general hardware design, and also in embedded multicore system components, such as CPUs, disks, displays and memories. Lastly, Chapter 9 presents a real embedded MCSoCs system design targeted for health monitoring in the elderly.

This book focuses on neuromorphic computing principles and organization and how to build fault-tolerant scalable hardware for large and medium scale spiking neural networks with learning capabilities. In addition, the book describes in a comprehensive way the organization and how to design a spike-based neuromorphic system to perform network of spiking neurons communication, computing, and adaptive learning for emerging AI applications. The book begins with an overview of neuromorphic computing systems and explores the fundamental concepts of artificial neural networks. Next, we discuss artificial neurons and how they have evolved in their representation of biological neuronal dynamics. Afterward, we discuss implementing these neural networks in neuron models, storage technologies, inter-neuron communication networks, learning, and various design approaches. Then, comes the fundamental design principle to build an efficient neuromorphic system in hardware. The challenges that need to be solved toward building a spiking neural network architecture with many synapses are discussed. Learning in neuromorphic computing systems and the major emerging memory technologies that promise neuromorphic computing are then given. A particular chapter of this book is dedicated to the circuits and architectures used for communication in neuromorphic systems. In particular, the Network-on-Chip fabric is introduced for receiving and transmitting spikes following the Address Event Representation (AER) protocol and the memory accessing method. In addition, the interconnect design principle is covered to help understand the overall concept of on-chip and off-chip communication. Advanced on-chip interconnect technologies, including si-photonic three-dimensional interconnects and fault-tolerant routing algorithms, are also given. The book also covers the main threats of reliability and discusses several recovery methods for multicore neuromorphic systems. This is important for reliable processing in several embedded neuromorphic applications. A reconfigurable design approach that supports multiple target applications via dynamic reconfigurability, network topology independence, and network expandability is also described in the subsequent chapters. The book ends with a case study about a real hardware-software design of a reliable three-dimensional digital neuromorphic processor geared explicitly toward the 3D-ICs biological brain’s three-dimensional structure. The platform enables high integration density and slight spike delay of spiking networks and features a scalable design. We present methods for fault detection and recovery in a neuromorphic system as well. Neuromorphic Computing Principles and Organization is an excellent resource for researchers, scientists, graduate students, and hardware-software engineers dealing with the ever-increasing demands on fault-tolerance, scalability, and low power consumption. It is also an excellent resource for teaching advanced undergraduate and graduate students about the fundamentals concepts, organization, and actual hardware-software design of reliable neuromorphic systems with learning and fault-tolerance capabilities.

System on chips designs have evolved from fairly simple unicore, single memory designs to complex heterogeneous multicore SoC architectures consisting of a large number of IP blocks on the same silicon. To meet high computational demands posed by latest consumer electronic devices, most current systems are based on such paradigm, which represents a real revolution in many aspects in computing. The attraction of multicore processing for power reduction is compelling. By splitting a set of tasks among multiple processor cores, the operating frequency necessary for each core can be reduced, allowing to reduce the voltage on each core. Because dynamic power is proportional to the frequency and to the square of the voltage, we get a big gain, even though we may have more cores running. As more and more cores are integrated into these designs to share the ever increasing processing load, the main challenges lie in efficient memory hierarchy, scalable system interconnect, new programming paradigms, and efficient integration methodology for connecting such heterogeneous cores into a single system capable of leveraging their individual flexibility. Current design methods tend toward mixed HW/SW co-designs targeting multicore systems on-chip for specific applications. To decide on the lowest cost mix of cores, designers must iteratively map the device's functionality to a particular HW/SW partition and target architectures. In addition, to connect the heterogeneous cores, the architecture requires high performance complex communication architectures and efficient communication protocols, such as hierarchical bus, point-to-point connection, or Network-on-Chip. Software development also becomes far more complex due to the difficulties in breaking a single processing task into multiple parts that can be processed separately and then reassembled later. This reflects the fact that certain processor jobs cannot be easily parallelized to run concurrently on multiple processing cores and that load balancing between processing cores - especially heterogeneous cores - is very difficult.

This book focuses on neuromorphic computing principles and organization and how to build fault-tolerant scalable hardware for large and medium scale spiking neural networks with learning capabilities. In addition, the book describes in a comprehensive way the organization and how to design a spike-based neuromorphic system to perform network of spiking neurons communication, computing, and adaptive learning for emerging AI applications. The book begins with an overview of neuromorphic computing systems and explores the fundamental concepts of artificial neural networks. Next, we discuss artificial neurons and how they have evolved in their representation of biological neuronal dynamics. Afterward, we discuss implementing these neural networks in neuron models, storage technologies, inter-neuron communication networks, learning, and various design approaches. Then, comes the fundamental design principle to build an efficient neuromorphic system in hardware. The challenges that need to be solved toward building a spiking neural network architecture with many synapses are discussed. Learning in neuromorphic computing systems and the major emerging memory technologies that promise neuromorphic computing are then given. A particular chapter of this book is dedicated to the circuits and architectures used for communication in neuromorphic systems. In particular, the Network-on-Chip fabric is introduced for receiving and transmitting spikes following the Address Event Representation (AER) protocol and the memory accessing method. In addition, the interconnect design principle is covered to help understand the overall concept of on-chip and off-chip communication. Advanced on-chip interconnect technologies, including si-photonic three-dimensional interconnects and fault-tolerant routing algorithms, are also given. The book also covers the main threats of reliability and discusses several recovery methods for multicore neuromorphic systems. This is important for reliable processing in several embedded neuromorphic applications. A reconfigurable design approach that supports multiple target applications via dynamic reconfigurability, network topology independence, and network expandability is also described in the subsequent chapters. The book ends with a case study about a real hardware-software design of a reliable three-dimensional digital neuromorphic processor geared explicitly toward the 3D-ICs biological brain's three-dimensional structure. The platform enables high integration density and slight spike delay of spiking networks and features a scalable design. We present methods for fault detection and recovery in a neuromorphic system as well. Neuromorphic Computing Principles and Organization is an excellent resource for researchers, scientists, graduate students, and hardware-software engineers dealing with the ever-increasing demands on fault-tolerance, scalability, and low power consumption. It is also an excellent resource for teaching advanced undergraduate and graduate students about the fundamentals concepts, organization, and actual hardware-software design of reliable neuromorphic systems with learning and fault-tolerance capabilities.