Executive overview on execution platforms

Professor Hugo De Man of the IMEC research centre in Leuven, Belgium, calls the rise of embedded systems the 'third innovation wave' in ICT. First there was the period of the main frames, where many users shared one computer. Then we have seen the period of the personal computers, with each user having one computer, and now we enter the period with many computers for each 'user'. These networked computers form new, sophisticated architectures, consisting of large numbers of interconnected programmable devices and ASICs.