Performance analysis and design space exploration for high-end biomedical applications: challenges and solutions

High-end biomedical applications are a good target for specific-purpose system-on-chip (SoC) implementations. Human heart electrocardiogram (ECG) real-time monitoring and analysis is an immediate example with a large potential market. Today, the lack of scalable hardware platforms limits real-time analysis capabilities of most portable ECG analyzers, and prevents the upgrade of analysis algorithms for better accuracy. Multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) technology, which is becoming main-stream in the domain of high-performance microprocessors, is becoming attractive even for power-constrained portable applications, due to the capability to provide scalable computation horsepower at an affordable power cost. This paper illustrates one of the first comprehensive HW/SW exploration frameworks to fully exploit MPSoC technology to improve the quality of real-time ECG analysis.