Chapter 2. Opportunities for Application-Specific Processors: The Case of Wireless Communications

Gerd Ascheid and Heinrich Meyr

We presently observe a paradigm change in designing complex systems-on-chip (SoCs) such as occurs roughly every 12 years due to the exponentially increasing number of transistors on a chip. This paradigm change, as all the previous ones, is characterized by a move to a higher level of abstraction. Instead of thinking in register-transfer level (RTL) blocks and wires, one needs to think in computing elements and interconnect. There are technical issues as well as nontechnical issues associated with this paradigm change. Several competing approaches are discussed in the context of this paradigm change.

The discussion of ...

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