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The main intention of this book is to give an impression of the state-of-the-art in system-level memory management (data transfer and storage) related issues for complex data-dominated real-time signal and data processing applications. The material is based on research at IMEC in this area in the period 1989- 1997. In order to deal with the stringent timing requirements and the data dominated characteristics of this domain, we have adopted a target architecture style and a systematic methodology to make the exploration and optimization of such systems feasible. Our approach is also very heavily application­ driven which is illustrated by several realistic demonstrators, partly used as red-thread examples in the book. Moreover, the book addresses only the steps above the traditional high-level synthesis (scheduling and allocation) or compilation (traditional or ILP oriented) tasks. The latter are mainly focussed on scalar or scalar stream operations and data where the internal structure of the complex data types is not exploited, in contrast to the approaches discussed here. The proposed methodologies are largely independent of the level of programmability in the data-path and controller so they are valuable for the realisation of both hardware and software systems. Our target domain consists of signal and data processing systems which deal with large amounts of data.

This book is the first in aseries on novellow power design architectures, methods and design practices. It results from of a large European project started in 1997, whose goal is to promote the further development and the faster and wider industrial use of advanced design methods for reducing the power consumption of electronic systems. Low power design became crucial with the wide spread of portable information and cornrnunication terminals, where a small battery has to last for a long period. High performance electronics, in addition, suffers from a permanent increase of the dissipated power per square millimetre of silicon, due to the increasing eIock-rates, which causes cooling and reliability problems or otherwise limits the performance. The European Union's Information Technologies Programme'Esprit'did there­ fore launch a'Pilot action for Low Power Design', wh ich eventually grew to 19 R&D projects and one coordination project, with an overall budget of 14 million Euro. It is meanwhile known as European Low Power Initiative for Electronic System Design (ESD-LPD) and will be completed by the end of 2001. It involves 30 major Euro­ pean companies and 20 well-known institutes. The R&D projects aims to develop or demonstrate new design methods for power reduction, while the coordination project takes care that the methods, experiences and results are properly documented and pub­ licised.