Performance Analysis and Design Space Exploration for High-End Biomedical Applications: Challenges and Solutions

High-end biomedical applications are a good target for specific-purpose System-on-Chip (SoC) implementations. Human heart ElectroCardioGram (ECG) real-time monitoring and analysis is an immediate example with a large potential market. Today, the lack of scalable hardware platforms limits real-time analysis capabilities of most portable ECG analyzers, and prevents the upgrade of analysis algorithms for better accuracy. MultiProcessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) technology, which is becoming main-stream in the domain of high-performance microprocessors, is becoming attractive even for power-constrained portable applications, due to the capability to provide scalable computation horsepower at an affordable power cost.