Chapter 1. Introduction

Trends in System-On-Chip Design

Advances in silicon technology continue to leapfrog projections: At the time this book was being written, we were seeing numerous announcements for billion-transistor chips, whereas only a few years ago integrated circuit transistor counts were in the millions. Such single chip integrated circuits are commonly referred to as system-on-chip (SoC), and typically consist of several complex heterogeneous components such as programmable processors, dedicated (custom) hardware to perform specific tasks, on-chip memories, input–output interfaces, and an on-chip communication architecture that serves as the interconnection fabric for communication between these components. The dual forces of advances ...

Get On-Chip Communication Architectures now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.