This book serves as a reference for researchers and designers in Embedded Systems who need to explore design alternatives.  It provides a design space exploration methodology for the analysis of system characteristics and the selection of the most appropriate architectural solution to satisfy requirements in terms of performance, power consumption, number of required resources, etc.  Coverage focuses on the design of complex multimedia applications, where the choice of the optimal design alternative in terms of application/architecture pair is too complex to be pursued through a full search comparison, especially because of the multi-objective nature of the designer’s goal, the simulation time required and the number of parameters of the multi-core architecture to be optimized concurrently.