1. Introduction
In the Smart chipS for Smart Surroundings (4S) project [1] we propose a heterogeneous multi-tile System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture with run-time software and tools. The SoC architecture contains a heterogeneous set of processing tiles interconnected by a Network-on-Chip (NoC) as depicted in Fig. 1. The run-time software determines a near optimal mapping of applications to the heterogeneous architecture at run-time. The architecture including the runtime software can replace inflexible ASICs for future ambient systems.
These ambient systems have to support wide range of applications so they have to be flexible as well as energy efficient. The designer has to partition the application into a Kahn like process graph model. In this model the application is represented as a graph with communicating functional processes (see for example Fig. 2). At run time, the individual processes of the application will be mapped on the tiles that can execute it most efficiently. The communication channels between processes are mapped on the NoC architecture.