This book provides insight into a number of different flavors of processor architectures and their design software tool generation implementation and verification. After a brief introduction to processor architectures and how processor designers have sometimes failed to deliver what was expected the authors introduce a generic flow for embedded on-chip processor design and start to explore the vast design space of on-chip processing. The types of processor cores covered include general purpose RISC cores traditional DSP a VLIW approach to signal processing processor cores that can be customized for specific applications reconfigurable processors protocol processors Java engines and stream processors. In addition the book describes co-processor and multi-core design approaches that deliver application-specific performance over and above that which is available from single-core designs.