Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips

5.1. Introduction

The rapid evolution of silicon technology is bringing a new crisis to system-on-chip (SoC) design. To be competitive, new communication, consumer, and computer product designs must exhibit rapid increases in functionality, reliability, and bandwidth and rapid declines in cost and power consumption. All these improvements dictate increasing use of high-integration silicon, for which many of the data-intensive capabilities are presently realized with register-transfer-level (RTL) hardware-design techniques. At the same time, the design productivity gap, the growing cost of deep-sub-micron semiconductor manufacturing, and the time-to-market pressures of a global electronics market all put intense pressure on chip designers to develop ...