You owe it to yourself to read Atrenta’s new SoC Realization White Paper. At 19 pages, you’ll need about half an hour to get through it, but if you and your company are at all involved in SoC development, then you need to read this overview.
The White Paper starts with an introduction that gives an overview of all three EDA360 Realizations: System Realization, SoC Realization, and Silicon Realization. Here’s its definition of SoC Realization:
“SoC Realization—Forms an all-important bridge between System Realization and Silicon Realization. It is here that the architecture of the semiconductor devices is defined, the semiconductor IP, or building blocks for the chip, are chosen and the design is matured to a stage where it is ready to be handed off to Silicon Realization.”
Soc Realization, continues the White Paper, “forms a “bridge” between the heretofore isolated markets of System Realization and Silicon Realization.”
You will find Chapter 1 about the SoC Era of interest as well. It discusses the rise of the SoC and how such chips are now developed: “A substantial portion of an SoC may contain parts of previous generation chips that are reused to save time and ensure reliability.”
Chapter 1 continues: “SoCs have vast potential to expand the scale of innovation and functionality offered by system developers of all types… In many ways this effect is similar to the impact the application specific integration circuit (ASIC) business model had in the late 1980s.”
Here are a few more extracts to whet your appetite for this White Paper:
“Companies competing in the high stakes game of consumer electronics are constantly searching for approaches that can meet the demanding market requirements, while still allowing them to differentiate and be profitable. The growing paradox in electronics is that as products must conform to more demanding consumer market dynamics – faster development times, lower costs, more efficient derivative designs – the technical and economic realities of sophisticated electronic design and manufacturing are driving costs and cycle times in the opposite direction.”
“…interesting and non-traditional semiconductor players are entering the SoC landscape as well. Google, with its Android platform is an ideal example of the importance and control that software has in the new SoC ecosystem.”
And finally:
“These days software is king and programmability is the key, a departure from the hardware-focused era of gates-and-switches chip design. Application software [apps] defines the differentiated value of the system for the consumer.”
For some reason, Atrenta has made this White Paper difficult to find on the company’s site. You’ll find it here.
There’s only one problem with this White Paper. I wish I’d written it.
EDA360 Insider 