This book is intended as an introduction to the design of digital processors that are dedicated to performing a particular task. It presents a number of general methods and also covers general purpose architectures such as programmable processors and configurable logic. In fact, the dedicated digital system might be based on a standard microprocessor with dedicated software, or on an application-specific hardware circuit. It turns out that there is no clear distinction between hardware and software, and a number of techniques like algorithmic constructions using high-level languages, and automated design using compilation apply to both. For some time, dynamic allocation methods for storage and other resources have been common for software while hardware used to be configured statically. Even this distinction vanishes by using static allocation techniques to optimize software functions and by dynamically reconfiguring hardware substructures.

The emphasis in this book is on the common, system-level aspects of hardware and software structures. Among these are the timing of computations and handshaking that need to be considered in software but play a more prominent role in hardware design. The same applies to questions of power consumption. System design is presented as the optimization task to provide certain functions under given constraints at the lowest possible cost (a task considered as one of the basic characteristics of engineering). Detailed sample applications are taken from the domain of digital signal processing. The text also includes some detail on recent FPGA (field programmable gate arrays), memory, and processor, in particular DSP (digital signal processor) chips. The selected chips serve to demonstrate the state of the art and various design aspects; there remain interesting others that could not be covered just for reasons of space. The statements made in the text regarding these chips are all conclusions by the author that may be erroneous due to incomplete or wrong data.Viable corrections mailed to the author will be posted to a page dedicated to this book at the web site: www.tu-harburg.de/ti6/ddp along with other supplementary information.