Soft core processors and embedded processing: a survey and analysis

— Reconfigurable technologies provide designers the opportunity to diminish the life-cycle into processor creation. New emerging capabilities in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), including improvements in power consumption, time delays, and cost per unit device, are enabling-us to incorporate these devices in several designs as reconfigurable embedded processors. New Electronic-Design-Automation (EDA) tools, allow us to construct rapid prototypes of Systems-on-a-Chip in a very mature way. The design is realized into hardware-software co-design environments, and the use of soft-cores like processor and peripherals reduces drastically the development cycle. Nowadays, the prototyping is done in hardware platforms with several FPGAs, which contains integrated circuits for external connectivity. In this paper, the authors describe the current available reconfigurable technology, focusing on FPGAs, soft-cores and it's applicability in the new embedded systems. We evidence in this survey the current potentiality of these technologies, presenting their main qualitative and quantitative characteristics.

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