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+An embedded system is an application integrated into one or several chips
+in order to accelerate it or to embedd it into a small device such as a personal 
+digital assistant (PDA).
+This topic is investigated since 80s using Applications Specific Integrated
+Circuits (ASIC), Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and parallel computing on
+multiprocessor machines or networks.
+More recently, since end of 90s, other technologies appeared like Very
+Large Instruction Word (VLIW), Application Specific Instruction Processors
+(ASIP), System on Chip (SoC), Multi-Processors SoC (MPSoC).
+\\
+During these last decades embedded system was reserved to major industrial
+companies targeting high volume market due to the design and fabrication
+costs.
+Nowadays Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), like Virtex5 from Xilinx
+and Stratix4 from Altera, can implement a SoC with multiple processors and
+several coprocessors for less than 10K euros per item. In addition, High
+Level Synthesis (HLS) becomes more mature and allows to automate design and
+to drastically decrease its cost in terms of man power. Thus, both FPGA and
+HLS tend to spread over HPC for small companies targeting low volume
+markets.
+\par
+To get an efficient embedded system, designer has to take into account
+application characteristics when it chooses one of the former technologies.
+This choice is not easy and in most cases designer has to try different
+technologies to retain the most adapted one.
+\\
+The first objective of COACH is to provide an open-source framework to
+design embedded system on FPGA device.
+COACH framework allows designer to explore various software/hardware
+partitions of the target application, to run timing and functional
+simulations and to generate automatically both the software and the
+synthesizable description of the hardware.
+The main topics of the project are:
+\begin{itemize} 
+\item
+Design space exploration: It consists in analysing the application runnig
+on FPGA, defining the target technology (SoC, MPSoC, ASIP, ...) and
+hardware/software partitioning of tasks depending on technology choice.
+This exploration is driven basically by throughput, latency and power
+consumption criteria.
+\item
+Micro-architectural exploration: When hardware components are required, the
+HLS tools of the framework generate them automatically. At this stage the
+framework provides various HLS tools allowing the micro-architectural space
+design exploration. The exploration criteria are also throughput, latency
+and power consumption.
+%FIXME:CA
+%FIXME:CA At this stage, preliminary source-level transformations will be
+%FIXME:CA required to improve the efficiency of the target component.
+%FIXME:CA COACH will also provide such facilities, such as automatic parallelization
+%FIXME:CA and memory optimisation.
+\item
+Performance measurement: For each point of design space exploration,
+metrics of criteria are available such as throughput, latency, power
+consumption, area, memory allocation and data locality. They are evaluated
+using virtual prototyping, estimation or analysing methodologies.
+\item
+Targeted hardware technology: The COACH description of system is
+independent of the FPGA family.  Every point of the design exploration
+space can be implemented on any FPGA having the required resources.
+Basically, COACH handles both Altera and Xilinx FPGA families.
+\end{itemize}
+As an extension of embedded system design, COACH deals also with High
+Performance Computing (HPC).
+In HPC, the kind of targeted application is an existing one running on PC.
+COACH helps designer to accelerate it by migrating critical parts into a
+SoC implemented on a FPGA plugged to the PC bus.
+\par
+COACH is the result of the will of several laboratory to unify their know
+how and skills in the following domains: Operating system and hardware
+communication (TIMA, SITI), SoC and MPSoC (LIP6 and TIMA), ASIP (IRISA) and
+HLS (LIP6, Lab-STIC and LIP).
+The project objective is to integrate these various domains into a unique
+free framework (licence ...) masking as much as possible these domains and
+its different tools to the user.
+