From ASICs to SOCs: A Practical Approach

1.3. Intellectual Property

In today's rapidly growing IC technology, the number of gates per chip can reach several millions, exceeding Moore's law: “The capacity of electronic circuits doubles every 18 months.” To overcome the design gap generated by such fast-growing capacity and lack of available manpower, reuse of the existing designs becomes a vital concept in design methodology. IC designers typically use predesigned modules to avoid reinventing the wheel for every new product. Utilizing the predesigned modules accelerates the development of new products to meet today's time-to-market challenges. By practicing design-reuse techniques—that is, using blocks that have been designed, verified, and used previously—various blocks of a large ASIC/SOC ...