IMEC is Europe's leading independent research center in the field of micro- and nanoelectronics, nanotechnology, enabling design methods and technologies for ICT systems, with major industrial backing. This talk will give a brief overview of the activities in the Design Technology group, followed by an in-depth look at the methods that have been developed to support mapping software onto low power programmable embedded systems. The two main focuses are software managed caches and mapping sequential programs onto multi-core architectures. Subjects that will be touched on include data-flow models of computation for embedded systems, polyhedral modeling of array accesses and recent results from applying the techniques to a full MPEG-4 encoder.