A Disciplined Approach to the Development of Platform Architectures [abstract] (CiteSeerX, PDF)
David I. August, Kurt Keutzer, Sharad Malik, and A. Richard Newton
Microelectronics Journal, Volume 33, Number 11, November 2002. Invited.

Silicon capability has enabled the embedding of an entire system on a single silicon die. These devices are known as systems-on-a-chip. Currently, the design of these devices is undisciplined, expensive, and risky. One way of amortizing the cost and ameliorating this design risk is to make a single integrated circuit serve multiple applications, and the natural way of enabling this is through end-user programmability. The aim of the MESCAL project, which is the subject of this paper, is to introduce a disciplined approach to producing reusable architectural platforms that can be easily programmed to meet a variety of applications. (MESCAL stands for Modern Embedded Systems, Compilers, Architectures, and Languages.)