Challenges of multi- and many-core architectures for electronic system-level design

In today´s design of embedded systems the software part is increasingly important. Over the last years we have observed a shift from hardware to software added value. With the rise of multi- and many-core platforms even more complex software systems can be implemented. To efficiently map software applications to such architectures, the impact of platform decisions with respect to the hardware and the software infrastructure (OS, scheduling policies, priorities, mapping) has to be explored in early design phases. In this work, we discuss the challenges of the multi- and many-core design-space. We give an overview of our existing SystemC™-based OSSS design flow including software multitasking in system-level models. We propose extensions towards multi- and many-core platform models and discuss which aspects of the system behaviour can be captured. Since this is work in progress we end up with challenges which have not been solved until now and propose new concepts to overcome the current limitations.