SoC and software systems: Promises and consequences of unlimited distributed intelligence

Advances in microelectronics and electronic integration are continously generating smaller and faster devices with decreasing power consumption and increased functionality. Aside a continuos improvement of applications which benefit from a continuos growth of platform performance, new application areas open up with the availability of new basic hardware concepts: SoC spearheads the advent of unlimited, distributed computational devices for creating highly parallel collaborative systems. It is the application requirements pull which introduces complexity to the co-operation of the members of such collaborative systems. If we look at such systems being a collection of service providers co-operating independently in fulfilling an overall goal, we must provide metaservices for supporting such a market of services, i.e. we need service agencies which offer, withdraw and co-ordinate the services provided by those service providers. Aspects of concern for the service agencies are, among many others, the optimization of the use of services, dependability issues and the logistics of services including the availability and the accounting of the use of services. Scenarios of such applications are found in fields where numerous distributed sensors of various sensor functionalities are needed to capture and evaluate the statuses of situations which then are tackled through automatically and/or human generated decisions and actions in a highly distributed environment. The concept of Embedded Systems is one of widely discussed ideas at present. The author is firmly convinced, that the SoC technology will be a basic prerequisite for exploiting this idea. Vice versa, the SoC technology will not constitute embedded systems on its own. The problems of organizing the co-operation of such devices in a highly collaborative application environment is a critical issue.