A disciplined approach to the development of platform architectures

Silicon capability has enabled the embedding of an entire system on a single silicon die. These devices are known as systems-on-a-chip. Currently, the design of these devices is undisciplined, expensive, and risky. One way of amortizing the cost and ameliorating this design risk is to make a single integrated circuit serve multiple applications, and the natural way of enabling this is through end-user programmability. The aim of the MESCAL project, which is the subject of this paper, is to introduce a disciplined approach to producing reusable architectural platforms that can be easily programmed to meet a variety of applications. (MESCAL stands for Modern Embedded Systems, Compilers, Architectures, and Languages.)