Designing SOCs with Configured Cores

15.4. The Future Direction of SOC Design

Engineers have been designing and building bridges for thousands of years. During those centuries, they have developed these several basic bridge types and many combinations of the basic types. Several different bridge types can often solve a specific bridging problem, so there’s no push-button method for selecting one bridge type over another except in situations where there’s one obvious solution to a bridging problem. Instead, bridge engineers have developed ways of generating different alternatives by combining the basic bridge types and then comparing the alternatives to pick the “best” one, where “best” includes a wide range of criteria including quantitative (span length, carrying capacity, cost, ...