Beyond the von Neumann machine: communication as the driving design paradigm for MP-SoC from software to hardware

While the original von Neumann machine concept reflected the single clock nature of the original hardware, today’s hardware and software are very far removed from it. This will be true in particular for MPSoC where for efficiency reasons different processor types running in different clock domains will co-exist. Hence, this also requires a different way of programming and designing such a MP-SoC. In addition as the communication has become the bottleneck, one should consider an architecture that adds processing blocks as “co-processors” to a communication backbone. Several consequences are highlighted: the need for a communication-oriented specification and programming style, a communication subsystem with real-time QoS as a system service and reconfigurability to cover a wide range of applications with a single MPSoC.