Designing SOCs with Configured Cores

15.1.1. SOC Disaster Scenario 1: Insufficient Productivity

Each new IC process node doubles the number of available transistors. To keep up, SOC-design teams must also become at least twice as productive with each new process generation. A major part of the required productivity improvement must come from design reuse. Originally, “reuse” meant using a hardware block that had been designed earlier by someone working for the same company. The market for purchased IP blocks didn’t exist at that time because chips were too small to exploit large digital blocks and the required small blocks were relatively easy to design. As chips have gotten much larger, with millions of available gates, the market for large blocks in the form of purchased IP has ...