The Co-design of System-on-Chip in Africa: Spotlights on Industry, Research Efforts, Trends, and Challenges

On a worldwide basis, Europe, United States of America (USA), and Asian countries continue to reinforce their leading position and intensify their market share of the global worldwide sales of semiconductors and electronic design automation (EDA ) tools. In the emerging field of system-on-chip (SoC) design, research efforts targeting co-design methodologies and tools in these countries follow the same direction. During the last decade, African research efforts in the SoC design domain continue to grow and follow the worldwide evolution and trends. This chapter provides an analysis of the major technological advances in the semiconductor and EDA industries with a special focus on the situation of Africa among this progress. This chapter will also detail the two ages of SoC design research efforts in Africa: the age of language-based design flows and the age of model-based co-design flows. This in-depth paper provides an analysis of the SoC design process including approaches, trends, challenges, and perspectives making Africa in the center of interest.

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