Going mobile: the next horizon for multi-million gate designs in the semi-conductor industry

The complexity of a System-on-Chip design is not only in the million transistors packed in a square millimeter. The major challenge for technical success of a SoC is to make sure that millions lines of software fit in with millions gates. In this paper, the problematic of multi-million gate design is illustrated from the viewpoint of a practical development of a complex digital system done at STMicroelectronics for a GSM/GPRS cellular application.