Handling Dynamism in Embedded System Design by Application Scenarios Stefan Valentin Gheorghita 1 , Twan Basten, Henk Corporaal * EE Department, Electronic Systems Group, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands {s.v.gheorghita,a.a.basten,h.corporaal}@tue.nl ABSTRACT In the past years, real-time embedded systems became more and more complex. From the user perspective, these systems have stringent requirements regarding size, performance and power consumption, and due to business competition, their time-to-market is a crucial factor. Therefore, much work has been done in developing design methodologies for embedded systems to cope with these tight requirements. In this work, we present a basic methodology based on the concept of application scenarios for handling in real-time embedded systems design the dynamism that appears within the applications. As a case study, we apply this methodology for reducing the energy consumption on a dynamic voltage aware processor. KEYWORDS : Application Scenarios, Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS), Embedded Systems 1 Introduction Modern multimedia applications usually have real-time constraints and they are imple- mented using heterogeneous multiprocessor systems-on-chip. Dimensioning a system re- quires accurate estimations of resources needed by the applications. Overestimation leads to over-dimensioning. If the entire application is analyzed at once, a large over-estimation will result as modern applications have a lot of dynamism, and due to the limited informa- tion that may be derived. For a more accurate estimation, all the operation modes in which an application can run must be considered. To avoid an explosion in the number of different modes, those that are similar with respect to required resources should be analyzed together. To do this, we combine them into an application scenario. 2 Scenario Based Design Scenario based design has been used for a long time in different areas, including embed- ded system design ([Paul05, Doug04]. These scenarios describe, in an early phase of the 1 This work was supported by the Dutch Science Foundation, NWO, project FAME, number 612.064.101.