This paper introduces a few research studies being conducted that are using multicore embedded systems, highlighting the challenges and questions relevant to R&D (Research and Development) in computer systems architecture, focusing on design aspects and optimization of embedded systems that needs to run security solutions or cryptographical algorithms using hardware acceleration, aiming for good performance, code optimizations, and the lowest energy consumption. Another aspects are the design

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... dedicated processors for specific purposes, multicore systems and GPUs for security solutions and specific applications requiring high performance, with the possibility to work with FPGAs or embedded platforms with embedded multicore paradigm. Most of these applications are industrial, or from the electro-electronics sector in industrialized or in technological modernization countries, with massive impact as an excellent alternative in research and development when associated with the needs of small and medium companies that need, use and make available in any way, circuits and computing digital systems. With this last reason in mind, it is important to stress that the reconfigurable computing area can bring many academics, industrial and commercial benefits, allowing and making it easy for a larger interaction between researchers, professors, students, professionals and entrepreneurs from the most diverse sectors of economy. Besides, with the new ways of designing and developing integrated circuits brought by the use of FPGAs e SoC, it becomes desirable to use this technology in industrial applications in regions that are in the development stages. Normally, reconfigurable systems are designed for applications which require data parallelism, high regularity and big throughput. Some examples of this sort of applications are: video compression (discreet transforms as DCT -Discrete Cosine Transform, and time estimative), image processing, multimedia, data encryption and transforms used in DSPs (Digital Signal Processing) [11, 22, 24, 33] . In this sense, the use of FPGAs in these applications is justified for the following reasons: (i) High Speed: it is possible to optimize speed tuning critical parameters to the system. (ii) Flexible Level of Security: It is relatively easy to adapt new architectures and systems to new insights and optimizations. (iii) Cost/Performance relation: It is possible to select and design functional units, taking into consideration cost and performance. Example: choosing between designing just a few and slow arithmetic units, or fast and varied ones. (iv) Lower Cost: a project that uses FPGAs are relatively low in cost. The security in hardware area and its integration amongst different security services in embedded systems still need methods, techniques, and most importantly efficient prototypes in performance and power consumption. For this reason, it is still possible to create, capacitate, teach, promote and develop new methodologies and expand the use of these emergent technologies in applications in fields such as education and industry, which use programmable circuits and other platforms of embedded systems. For this purpose, different R&D groups of embedded systems are focusing on research and development of security solutions (study, design, optimization of power consumption and performance of cryptography algorithm and security services) in hardware and embedded platforms, with strong emphasis in the design aspects of the project, architecture definition and design of processors for specific security applications. As a study case, it is desired to make a fully functional version of an IP of a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) [5] for VANETs networks [39, 40] . This paper presents an overview of different hardware projects and new platforms using multicore architectures focusing in hardware security, and we show and discuss some aspects which could be open for new researches. This paper is organized in seven sections, and each one of them provides an information area and ends with questions which need to be further investigated. Section 2 presents information on security in embedded systems and specific hardware applied to aspects of information security. Section 3 approaches details of multicore and GPUs uses, highlighting subjects which can be researched in the near future. Section 4 emphasizes on techniques and research aspects of how to diminish and/or optimize the power consumption of computational applications, focusing on the need of tools which helps in the characterization of this consumption. He is editorial board of four international journals: IJCNS, TCS Springer, JUCS and JCP. He has experience in the area computer science and computer engineering, with emphasis in computer systems architecture, acting on the following subjects: computer architecture, embedded systems, hardware security, power-aware computing, high performnce computing and performance evaluation.