Handbook of Software Engineering

Abstract

As the number of cores on a chip increases, power consumed by the communication structures takes significant portion of the overall power-budget. The individual components of the SoCs will be heterogeneous in nature with widely varying functionality and communication requirements. The communication topology should possibly match communication workflows among these components. In this paper, we first propose an interconnection architecture for SoC, which uses crossroad switches to construct a dedicated communication path dynamically between any two cores. We then present a design methodology for constructing network on chip (NoC) for application-specific computer systems with profiled communication characteristics. We design a core placement tool, which automatically maps cores to a communication topology such that we can minimize the total communication energy. Experimental results show that the design methodology can generate optimized on-chip networks with fewer resources than meshes and tori, and the power saving approximates to 40%.

Integrating Project Management, Software Development, and Knowledge Management Models: A Case Study in a Public ICT Services Organization

“…The improvement of methods and techniques applied to software construction culminated in the structuring of development processes, along the same lines as the processes used in traditional engineering. The term process, as adopted in this work, follows the definition given by [15], who consider a process as a systematic and organized approach to plan, coordinate and execute tasks aimed at the improvement and effectiveness of software product development. The referred authors have identified four main benefits of the adoption of formal management processes: communication, coordination, training, understanding, and improvement.…”