Microelectronic allows the integration of complicated functions into products, increases
commercial attractivity of these products and improves their competitivity.
Multimedia and communication sectors have taken advantage from microelectronics facilities
thanks to the developpment of design methodologies and tools for real time embedded
systems.
Many other sectors could benefit from microelectronics if these methologies and tools were
adapted to their features. The Non Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs involded in designing
and manufacturing an ASIC is very high.
An IC foundry costs several billions of euros and the fabrication of a specific circuit
costs several millions. For example a conservative estimate for a 65nm ASIC project is 10
million USD.
Consequently, it is generally unfeasible to design and fabricate ASICs in
low volumes and ICs are designed to cover a broad applications spectrum at the cost of
some performance degradation.
\\
Today, FPGAs become important actors in the computational domain that was originally dominated
by microprocessors and ASICs. Just like microprocessors, FPGA based systems can be reprogrammed
on a per-application basis. At the same time, for many applications, FPGAs offer significant performance benefits over
microprocessors implementation. Although these benefits are still
generally an order of magnitude less than in equivalent ASIC implementations, low costs 
(500 euros to 10K euros), fast time to market and flexibility of FPGAs make them an attractive 
choice for low-to-medium volume applications. 
Since their introduction in the mid eighties, FPGAs evolved from a simple, 
low-capacity gate array to devices (Altera STRATIX III, Xilinx Virtex V) that
provide a mix of coarse-grained data path units, memory blocks, microprocessor cores, 
on chip A/D conversion, and gate counts by millions. This high logic capacity allows to implement
complex systems like multi-processors platform with application dedicated coprocessors. 
Table~\ref{fpga_market} shows the estimation of FPGA worldwide market in the next years in
various application domains. The ``high end'' lines concern only FPGA with high logic capacity for complex system implementations. 
This market is in significant expansion and is estimated to 914\,M\$ in 2012.
Using FPGA limits the NRE costs to the design cost. This boosts the developpment of of automatic design tools and methodologies.

\begin{table}\leavevmode\center
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|l|}\hline
Segment	        & 2010	& 2011	& 2012 \\\hline\hline
Communications	& 1,867	& 1,946	& 2,096 \\
High end	& 467	& 511	& 550 \\\hline
Consumer	& 550	& 592	& 672 \\
High end	& 53	& 62	& 75 \\\hline
Automotive	& 243	& 286	& 358 \\
High end	& -	& -	& - \\\hline
Industrial	& 1,102	& 1,228	& 1,406 \\
High end	& 177	& 188	& 207 \\\hline
Military/Aereo	& 566	& 636	& 717 \\
High end	& 56	& 65	& 82 \\\hline\hline
Total FPGA/PLD	& 4,659	& 5,015	& 5,583 \\
Total High-End  FPGA	& 753	& 826	& 914 \\\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{\label{fpga_market} Gartner estimation of worldwide FPGA/PLD consumption (Millions \$)}
\end{table}
\par
Today, several companies (atipa, blue-arc, Bull, Chelsio, Convey, CRAY, DataDirect, DELL, hp, 
Wild Systems, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Myricom, NEC, nvidia etc) are making systems where demand 
for very high performance (HPC) primes over other requirements. They tend to use the highest 
performing devices like Multi-core CPUs, GPUs, large FPGAs, custom ICs and the most innovative 
architectures and algorithms. These companies show up in different "traditional" applications and market 
segments like computing clusters (ad-hoc), servers and storage, networking and Telecom, ASIC 
emulation and prototyping, military/aereo etc. The HPC market size is estimated today by FPGA providers 
at 214\,M\$. 
This market is dominated by Multi-core CPUs and GPUs based solutions and the expansion 
of FPGA-based solutions is limited by the lack of design flow automation. Nowadays, there are neither commercial 
nor academic  tools covering the whole design process.
For instance, with SOPC Builder from Altera, users can select and parameterize IP components 
from an extensive drop-down list of communication, digital signal processor (DSP), microprocessor 
and bus interface cores, as well as incorporate their own IP. Designers can then generate 
a synthesized netlist, simulation test bench and custom software library that reflect the hardware 
configuration.
Nevertheless, SOPC Builder does not provide any facilities to synthesize coprocessors\emph{I
(Steven) disagree : the C2H compiler bundled with SOPCBuilder does a pretty good job at this} and to
simulate the platform at a high design level (systemC). 
In addition, SOPC Builder is proprietary and only works together with Altera's Quartus compilation
tool to implement designs on Altera devices (Stratix, Arria, Cyclone).
PICO [CITATION] and CATAPULT [CITATION] allow to synthesize coprocessors from a C++ description.
Nevertheless, they can only deal with data dominated applications and they do not handle the platform level.
The Xilinx System Generator for DSP [http://www.xilinx.com/tools/sysgen.htm] is a plug-in to 
Simulink that enables designers to develop high-performance DSP systems for Xilinx FPGAs. 
Designers can design and simulate a system using MATLAB and Simulink. The tool will then 
automatically generate synthesizable Hardware Description Language (HDL) code mapped to Xilinx 
pre-optimized algorithms. 
However, this tool targets only DSP based algorithms.
\\
Consequently, designers developping an embedded system needs to master for example
SoCLib for design exploration,
SOPC Builder at the platform level, 
PICO for synthesizing the data dominated coprocessors
and Quartus for design implementation.
This requires an important tools interfacing effort and makes the design process very complex 
and achievable only by designers skilled in many domains.
The aim of the COACH project is to integrate all these tools in the same framework and to allow \textbf{pure software} developpers to realize embedded systems.
\par
The combination of the framework dedicated to software developpers and FPGA target, allows to gain 
market share over Multi-core CPUs and GPUs HPC based solutions. 
Moreover, one can expect that small and even very small companies will be able to propose embedded 
system and accelerating solutions for standard software applications with acceptable prices, thanks 
 to the elimination of huge hardware investment in opposite to ASIC based solution.
\\
This new market may explode in the same way as the micro-computer market in the eighties. This success was due 
to the low cost of the first micro-processors (compared to main frames) and the advent of high level 
programming languages which allowed a high number of programmers to launch start-ups in software
engineering.

