'Designing Embedded Processors' examines the many ways in which processor based systems are designed to allow low power devices. It looks at processor design methods, memory optimization, dynamic voltage scaling methods, compiler methods, and multi processor methods. Each section has an introductory chapter to give a breadth view, and have a few specialist chapters in the area to give a deeper perspective. The book provides a good starting point to engineers in the area, and to research students embarking upon the exciting area of embedded systems and architectures.

This book describes analytical models and estimation methods to enhance performance estimation of pipelined multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). A framework is introduced for both design-time and run-time optimizations. For design space exploration, several algorithms are presented to minimize the area footprint of a pipelined MPSoC under a latency or a throughput constraint. A novel adaptive pipelined MPSoC architecture is described, where idle processors are transitioned into low-power states at run-time to reduce energy consumption. Multi-mode pipelined MPSoCs are introduced, where multiple pipelined MPSoCs optimized separately are merged into a single pipelined MPSoC, enabling further reduction of the area footprint by sharing the processors and communication buffers. Readers will benefit from the authors' combined use of analytical models, estimation methods and exploration algorithms and will be enabled to explore billions of design points in a few minutes.

This book describes analytical models and estimation methods to enhance performance estimation of pipelined multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). A framework is introduced for both design-time and run-time optimizations. For design space exploration, several algorithms are presented to minimize the area footprint of a pipelined MPSoC under a latency or a throughput constraint. A novel adaptive pipelined MPSoC architecture is described, where idle processors are transitioned into low-power states at run-time to reduce energy consumption. Multi-mode pipelined MPSoCs are introduced, where multiple pipelined MPSoCs optimized separately are merged into a single pipelined MPSoC, enabling further reduction of the area footprint by sharing the processors and communication buffers. Readers will benefit from the authors’ combined use of analytical models, estimation methods and exploration algorithms and will be enabled to explore billions of design points in a few minutes.

To the hard-pressed systems designer this book will come as a godsend. It is a hands-on guide to the many ways in which processor-based systems are designed to allow low power devices. Covering a huge range of topics, and co-authored by some of the field 's top practitioners, the book provides a good starting point for engineers in the area, and to research students embarking upon work on embedded systems and architectures.

Embedded Systems are ubiquitous, used in various applications, ranging from low-end electronic appliances to high-end rockets. Security on such systems is a major concern where any useful insight gained by the adversary is harmful. Side Channel Attacks (SCAs) are performed by observing properties such as power usage, processing time and electro magnetic(EM) emissions, to correlate these external manifestations with internal computations. These properties are used to obtain critical information, such as a secret key of a secure application. Power analysis has been the most effective technique to extract secret keys during the execution of cryptographic algorithms using SCAs. This book elaborates on power analysis based side channel attacks detailing all the common attacks and the countermeasures proposed in the past. It also presents novel processor designs to combat against such attacks.

Security and reliability in microprocessor based systems are concerns requiring adroit solutions. Countermeasures by software-only approaches increase code size and therefore significantly reduce performance. Hardware assisted approaches use additional hardware monitors and thus incur considerably high hardware cost and have scalability problems. Considering security and reliability issues during the design of an embedded system has its advantages as this overcomes the limitations of existing solutions. This book is written for hardware design engineers and students with fundamental knowledge of VLSI logic design. The benefits of considering security and reliability issues during the design of an embedded system can be exploited by designers with expertise in the field of VLSI design, computer architecture and embedded systems. This book provides essential knowledge on these areas and focuses on the practical solutions for real-world problems. This book constitutes of the PhD thesis of the first author, which was performed at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney between 2003 and 2006.