Systems on a Chip

The growing time-to-market pressure, the need for higher communication bandwidths, and new application areas like wireless communication and the emerging field of ubiquitous computing require a highly increased functionality of microelectronic products and make the development of more complex systems necessary. Some of the challenges for the new products are low manufacturing costs, smaller packaging, low power consumption, and improved reliability. Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) are widely considered the solution to the most urgent problems arising with this demands. SoC-based systems promise to combine short development times with low manufacturing and product integration costs, as well as low power consumption and high system reliability, while maintaining high speed implementations. Problems of this new SoC-implementation technique arise on one hand from the technological side dealing with increasing integration density and topics like mixed signal integration and on the other hand from the exploding design complexity including questions like system-level integration, test and verification, design re-use, on-chip communication and interfacing structures, reconfigurable subsystems, design for low-power, clock distribution, and the integration of analog or mixed-signal components into a digitally-dominated environment. In this chapter, some of today’s most pressing questions of SoCdesign and its upcoming solutions as well as developments like adaptable or Configurable SoCs (CSoC) and Networks-on-Chip (NoC) together with their application to multi-standard designs will be discussed.