Highly configurable platforms for embedded computing systems

Platform chips, which are pre-designed chips possessing numerous processors, memories, coprocessors, and field-programmable gates arrays, are becoming increasingly popular. Platforms eliminate the costs and risks associated with creating customized chips, but with the drawbacks of poorer performance and energy consumption. Making platforms highly configurable, so they can be tuned to the particular applications that will execute on those platforms, can help reduce those drawbacks. We discuss the trends leading embedded system designers towards the use of platforms instead of customized chips. We discuss UCR research in designing highly configurable platforms, highlighting some of our work in highly configurable caches, and in hardware/software partitioning.