Dataflow based design suite for the development and management of multi-functional reconfigurable systems

Embedded systems development constitutes an extremely challenging scenario for the designers since several constraints have to be meet at the same time. Flexibil- ity, performance and power efficiency are typically colliding requirements that are hardly addressed together. Reconfigurable systems provide a valuable alternative to common architectures to challenge contemporarily all those issues. Such a kind of systems, and in particular the coarse grained ones, exhibit a certain level of flexi- bility while guaranteeing strong performance. However they suffer of an increased design and management complexity. In this thesis it is discussed a fully automated methodology for the development of coarse grained reconfigurable platforms, by exploiting dataflow models for the de- scription of the desired functionalities. The thesis describes, actually, a whole design suite that offers, besides the reconfigurable substrate composition, also structural optimisation, dynamic power management and co-processing support. All the pro- vided features have been validated on different signal, image and video processing scenarios, targeting either FPGA and ASIC.