The growing demands on multimedia applications and high-speed high-quality telecommunication systems with real-time constrains oriented to portable, low power consumption, devices, have being driven technologies evelopment, methodologies and design flows of embedded systems during the last years. Through the analysis of design methodologies and strategies facing multi-core, reconfigurability and power consumption challenges, this educational survey will follow that evolution approaching ASIC and FPGA architectures on the embedded systems arena.