Abstract
The evolution of silicon integration capabilities has, for several decades, been pushing the limits of complexity management. In the nanotechnology era, billions of transistors can be assembled to form high-performance systems with varied functionalities. Today we could say that we connect processors for MPSoC design, just as we once assembled transistors for SoC. The building block has evolved and a concomitant paradigm shift is taking place. Indeed, the intrinsic capacity of a processor goes far beyond simply acting as a switch. A processor is indeed capable of controlling a system and performing complex calculations. The assembly of hundreds of elements offers new prospects, such as ambient intelligence or chip cloud computing. In this chapter, we analyze scalability in terms of functionality, technology and structure, and propose a general autonomous integrated system model. We then develop our approach to encompass distributed MPSoC systems. Self-adaptability, at the core of the evolution towards autonomous computing, is illustrated through several contributions aimed at compensating for technology, applicative and environmental variability phenomena. Finally, a macroscopic example of a multi-agent bio-inspired approach shows what we believe to be the future of integrated systems.