Hard- and Software Modularity of the NOVA MPSoC Platform

The network-optimized versatile architecture platform (NOVA) encapsulates embedded cores, tightly and loosely coupled coprocessors, on-chip memories, and I/O interfaces by special sockets that provide a common packet passing and communication infrastructure. To ease the programming of the heterogeneous multiprocessor target for the application developer, a component based framework is used for describing packet processing applications in a natural and productive way. Leveraging identical application and hardware communication semantics, code generators and off-the-shelf tool chains can automate the software implementation process. Using a prototype with four processing cores, the overhead of modularity and programmability for the platform was quantified