The recent spectacular progress in modern microelectronics that enabled implementation of a complete complex system on a single chip created new important opportunities, but also new serious difficulties. This paper briefly analyses the situation, trends and problems in the field of the modern microelectronic-based systems. However, the main aim of the paper is to discuss the paradigms of life-inspired systems and quality-driven design that seem to be adequate to overcome the difficulties, and consider their application to the architecture synthesis for complex real-time embedded systems