Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips

14.5. The Challenge of SoC Integration and IP Reuse

As the electronics industry demands ever more powerful and cheaper products, the latest chip design trend, thanks to the fabulous growth in the semiconductor industry, is to build all the circuitry needed for the complete electronic system on a single chip. Remarkable advances in manufacturing technology have blurred the traditional separation between component design and system design by allowing the merger of various components—pre-designed modules, hard or soft IP blocks, and so on—on the same silicon substrate. The buzzword used to describe such designs is SoC design. As depicted in Figure 14-6, these chips are no longer stand-alone components but complete silicon boards comprising nonhomogenous ...