ICT-eMuCo · Embedded Multi-Core Processing for Mobile Communication Systems

ICT-eMuCo addresses the platform architecture of future mobile devices. This comprises the relevant controller elements as well as the operating system and application layers. It is expected that the computational performance needed by these devices will grow exponentially due to the growing number of features implemented and the advances in the wireless communication standards. The fast growing number of applications and the resulting diversification requires a co-existence of open and protected environments.<br/>It is therefore proposed to choose a multi-core architecture to get the best ratio of performance and power consumption while maintaining a high flexibility and scalability in the system through variations in number of cores, cache sizes, clock speeds etc. Existing multi-cores are taken as a starting point for the controller architecture. The actual implementation of e.g. the cache and memory system will be optimized to the specific needs as well as the extension by hardware accelerators for dedicated tasks.<br/>Virtualization technology will be employed to abstract the applications including potential legacy operating systems from the hardware architecture. This provides the means to separate real-time from non-real-time and secure from open domains. To account for the embedded nature of mobile devices and its limitations in performance and power consumption the virtualisation functionalities are supported by hardware where appropriate.<br/>The awareness for the existence of multi-cores must also arise at the programmer's level. This is taken care of by a model-driven code generation technology based on SDL for typical communications protocol tasks and UML for the application development and modelling.