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Demand for innovative electronic devices, such as digital smart cameras/videos/phones, scanners, copiers, bio computing, medical imaging applications is overwhelming. These innovations require highly specialized computing power. Only chips that combine interrelated different types of hardware and software elements, called heterogeneous multi-core platforms, are able to execute these computations at low cost and power in a flexible manner in an embedded context. Power comes from the dedicated pieces of hardware (e.g., an IP core) that are 1000 - 10.000 more efficient in terms of compute power and energy then a full programmable solution (e.g., a DSP or CPU) which offers flexibility. Programming these platforms and taking advantage of the trade-off between flexibility and performance in hardware and software is highly complex and currently not automated. This results in long suboptimal design processes. Compaan has developed a ‘disruptive' technology that further automates the design process enabling automatic generation of a pipelined, streaming architecture of both hardware and software components in programming multi-core platforms. Using Compaan's technology shortens the design process by at least 15%, improves quality as the technology allows for easy exploration of alternative solutions, reduces cost as it takes less time to design, and creates value in that it allows engineers to design more applications in the same amount of time and to produce complex applications that would otherwise not have been feasible. Compaan differs from other solutions in its aggressive technology to find all parallelism in an application model and the use of the Kahn Process Network model to express parallelism. |
