Embedded Systems Design: Hardware and Software Interaction

This chapter introduces the definitions of the basic concepts used in the book. The chapter details the software and hardware organization for the heterogeneous MPSoC architectures and summarizes the main steps in programming MPSoC. The software design represents an incremental process performed at four MPSoC abstraction levels (system architecture, virtual architecture, transaction-accurate architecture, and virtual prototype). At each design step, different software components are generated and verified using hardware simulation models. The overall design flow is given in this chapter. Examples of target architectures and applications, which will be used in the remaining part of this book, are described.