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Nanoscale systems on chip will integrate billion-gate designs. The challenge is to find a scalable HW/SW design style for future CMOS technologies. Tiled architectures suggest a possible path: "small" processing tiles connected by "short wires". A typical SHAPES tile contains a VLIW floating-point DSP, a RISC, a DNP (Distributed Network Processor), distributed on chip memory, the POT (a set of Peripherals On Tile) plus an interface for DXM (Distributed External Memory). The SHAPES routing fabric connects on-chip and off-chip tiles, weaving a distributed packet switching network. 3D next-neighbours engineering methodologies is adopted for off-chip networking and maximum system density. The SW challenge is to provide a simple and efficient programming environment for tiled architectures. SHAPES will investigate a layered system software, which does not destroy algorithmic and distribution info provided by …