Designing SOCs with Configured Cores

2.9. Summary: Handling SOC Complexity

Simply put, SOC design costs and design risk are rising because global competitive pressures are causing system complexity to grow exponentially. Moore’s law places relentless pressure on system design from another direction by making more transistors available to system designers every year. Moore’s law has been in place since 1960 and it will continue to be enforced for many more years, according to the ITRS. Where “system” designers of the early 1960s were designing 5- and 7-transistor radios and board-level designers in the 1980s put a few LSI (large-scale integration) chips and a few dozen medium-scale integration (MSI) components on a board to make a system, today’s SOC designers funnel tens or hundreds ...