Custom Embedded Counterflow Pipelines

In recent years, many embedded systems have been introduced that require high-performance at a very low cost (e.g., dollar cost, development turn-around time, power consumption, etc.). These systems can be found in consumer products such as digital video and still cameras, cellular telephones and personal communication devices (e.g., digital two-way radios, wireless Internet modems), and digital audio players (e.g., Diamond’s Rio MP3 player). Although these applications need high-performance, aggressive general-purpose architectures such as Hewlett-Packard’s PA-8500 are too expensive to include in most embedded systems. A better solution is to customize an architecture to the specific performance and cost requirements of an application.