6. Conclusion

The consequences of Moore's Law mean that several billion transistors can now be integrated on a single chip. The development of CMOS technologies has put the spotlight on energy issues, and the design of hardware operators, and more generally of complete electronic or computer systems, must take into account the trade-off between speed – surface – consumption – cost.

A wide range of processors, from low-end controllers to high-end multicore processors, are available for high-performance and embedded systems. FPGAs for complete systems-on-a-chip, including multi-processors, are already on the market. Numerous operators are available in software form (IP).

These FPGAs are within the reach of engineers wishing to rapidly design complex hardware systems. The problem has shifted from the design of elementary hardware operators to the design...