Advances in c-based parallel design of MP-SOCs

As the main stream of system-on-a-chip (SOC) architectures is gradually switching from single processor to multiprocessor (MP) constellations, availability of easy-to-use/migrate parallel design methodologies are becoming more and more important. C-based design methodologies provide potentially easy migration path in SOC design, but they have traditionally lacked general purpose and easy-to-use tools for exploiting parallelism. However, recent advances in c-based design of MP-SOCs, like introduction of the e-language-a simple parallel extension of c for a class of emulated shared memory MP-SOCs-and related design methodology promise to overcome these problems. In this paper we describe latest advances in e-based design, including an initial implementation of e for concurrent memory access-ready architectures, fast mode providing a significant boost in parallel construct performance for simple e-programs, and support for active memory operations that drops the lower bound of the execution time of certain logarithmic algorithms to the constant execution time class.