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The market of digital systems is about 4,600 M\$ today and is estimated to 5,600 M\$ in 2012. However the ever growing applications complexity involves integration of heterogeneous technologies and requires the design of complex Multi-Processors System on Chip (MPSoC). During the last decade, the use of ASICs appeared to be more and more reserved to high volume markets, because the design and fabrication costs of such components exploded, due to increasing NRE (Non Recurring-Engineering) costs. Fortunately, recent FPGA components, such as the Virtex5-6 family from XILINX or the Stratix4 family from ALTERA, can nowadays implement a complete MPSoC with multiple processors and several dedicated coprocessors for a few Keuros per device.
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Many applications are initially captured algorithmically in High-Level Languages
(HLLs) such as C/C++. This has led to growing interest in tools that can provide
an implementation path directly from HLLs to hardware. Thus, Electronic System
Level (ESL) design methodologies (Virtual Prototyping, Co-design, High-Level
Synthesis...) are now mature but don’t allow still the full automation of a
system-level design flow.
Unfortunately, ESL tool development today has primarily focused on the design of
hardwired devices i.e. ASICs and ASSPs (Application Specific Standard Product).
However, the increasing sophistication of FPGAs has accelerated the need for
FPGA-based ESL design methodologies. ESL methodologies hold the promise of
streamlining the design approach by accepting designs written in C/C++ language
and implementing the function straight into FPGA. Coupling FPGA technologies and
ESL methodologies will allow both SMES and major companies to design innovative
devices and to enter new, low and medium volume markets. Furthermore, today
there is an increasing industrial interest in IC that integrates both hardwired
CPU cores or MPSoC and a configurable area (FPGA) such as Intel-ATOM E600C. In a
few years, such chips will surely be used in embedded systems and even standard
general purpose CPU cores will contains a configurable area.
This will make possible to target low and medium volume markets of digital
system and probably explode the indusrial activity of this markets.
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COACH is aligned with this long term vision, which requires an integrated design flow for the digital multiprocessors systems, targeting FPGAs and dedicated to the system and software designers; this project do not hope to solve all related issues, but aims at specifying and implementing innovative technological elements of the required tool chain. It will be dedicated to system/software designers, and hide as much as possible the hardware characteristics to the end-user. COACH will mainly target three kinds of digital systems: 1/ Embedded and autonomous application (personal digital assistants , ambient computing components, wireless sensor networks) 2/ mixed systems (CPU + FPGA extension boards) to accelerate a specific application answering High-Performance Computing (HPC) and High-Speed Signal Processing needs, 3/ Sub-system IP to be integrating into a larger system. 
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The COACH open-source environment will integrate several hardware and software technologies:
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\begin{itemize}
\item Design Space Exploration by allowing to describe an application as a process network i.e. a set of tasks communicating through FIFO channels and to map the application on a shared-memory, MPSoC architecture
\item High Level Synthesis  of hardware accelerators 
\item Platform based design: three architectural templates will be provided (free-generic, ALTERA and XILINX’s IPs based)
\item Hardware/Software communication middleware by implementing an homogeneous HW/SW communication infrastructure and communication API, that will be used for communications between software tasks running on embedded processors and dedicated hardware coprocessors
\item IP based design: using IP-XACT standard for describing the components of the architectural template and by providing the IP-XACT description of the generated MPSoC
\end{itemize}
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Finally, a large number of SMEs and large companies, (see "letters of interest" Annex \ref{lettre-soutien}),
have expressed their interest for this project:
\altera, FLEXRAS, INPIXAL, CAMKA System, RENESAS Design, EADS-ASTRIUM,
CONTINENTAl, TEAMCAST, ALSIM NAVTEL Systems.
\altera, a major FPGA company provides FPGA boards to the project.
These companies are either FPGA providers (engaged to collaborate by delivering FPGA board to partners),
design houses, EDA companies, or system integrators.
This heterogeneity of actors show the strong added value brought by the COACH platform.