Multithreaded Peripheral Processor for a Multicore Embedded System

Multithreaded and multicore architectures represent a good solution used for increasing of parallelism degree exploited in modern computing systems and they can reduce the power dissipated in the chip by using low-frequency clock signals. These advantages recommend these parallel architectures for integration in the embedded systems, with restrictions imposed by the relatively small integration area. Particularities of embedded applications require hardware support able to handling in real time the peripheral interrupt requests. The performance of this hardware influences the performance of the entire parallel system. The current trend is to integrate in one microcontroller more processors used for general purpose application and a processor used for peripherals related applications (like interrupt services). In this chapter we present a peripheral processor architecture implemented in multithreaded technology, processor able to handle more tasks concurrently. Parallel execution of these peripheral tasks, in conjunction with a multicore processor used in processing of the general application (e.g. operating system), will lead to an increase in overall performance of the embedded system.