System-on-a-Chip - A Platform Perspective

Today, IC technology offers the possibility of integrating so many functions onto a single chip that it is indeed possible to implement an “environment-to-environment” system on a single chip. The literature is rich with papers discussing the System-on-Chip (SoC) opportunities; however, there has not been a wide market acceptance for this concept. The basic misconception has been attempting to fit the SoC design methodology to the ASIC design flow that has been in vogue for the last ten years. The economics of SoC design are simply not appealing in the ASIC framework because of the dramatically increasing cost of SoC design and manufacturing and the relatively small product volumes. At the GigaScale Research Center (GSRC), an inter-university research consortium sponsored by the SIA and DARPA, researchers advocate a concept called platform -based design to address these challenging problems. Platform-based design represents a design methodology that can trade -off various components of manufacturing costs, NRE costs and design productivity at a minimal cost of “potential” de sign performance. In this paper, we will present the key concepts of platform-based design. The conference presentation will illustrate the idea with a number of examples.