Special session on “What´s next for ESL”

With the continuous increase in size, complexity and heterogeneity, the EDA community has to face the new challenges of designing future embedded systems. In this context, novel Electronic System Level (ESL) design flows are expected to significantly increase productivity by optimizing such systems across hardware/software boundaries while considering tens to hundreds of processing cores simultaneously. However, due to the complex nature of ESL design, future design flows have to integrate novel solutions in high speed virtual prototyping for early validation and performance evaluation as well as mapping and design space exploration to generate competitive high quality implementations. Moreover, novel synthesis approaches for embedded software and communication synthesis become mandatory to guarantee an efficient usage of processing and communication resources. The special session on “What´s next for ESL” is composed of four papers. One paper discusses architectural issues in the multi-processor era with a focus on communication refinement. Two papers present the state-of the-art in future trends in embedded software synthesis in the presence of multi-core architectures. One of these papers focuses on the role of software synthesis in the overall ESL design flow, whereas the second one focuses on model-based software synthesis approaches. Finally, one paper presents future challenges in design space exploration when performed on the Electronic System Level.