By: Ajay Kumar Shashank Joshi ECE-4th Year Shivalik College of Engineering

CONTENTS
Introduction
Basic SoC Model SoC Cores

Types of Cores
Interconnection Advantages Disadvantages Conclusion

INTRODUCTION
Technological Advances
todays chip can contains 100M transistors . transistor gate lengths are now in term of nano meters . approximately every 18 months the number of transistors on a chip

doubles Moores law .

The Consequences
components connected on a Printed Circuit Board can now be

integrated onto single chip . hence the development of System-On-Chip design .

What is System on Chip ?

A system on a chip or system on chip (SoC or SOC) is

an integrated circuit(IC) that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip.

Basic SoC Model

I-PHONE SoC

TYPES OF CORES
Soft Macro
Reusable synthesizable RTL or netlist of generic library elements User of the core is responsible for the implementation and layout

Firm Macro
Structurally and topologically optimized for performance and area

through floor planning and placement Exist as synthesized code or as a netlist of generic library elements

Hard Macro
Reusable blocks optimized for performance, power, size and mapped to

a specific process technology Exist as fully placed and routed netlist and as a fixed layout such as in GDSII format .

Reusability portability flexibility

Soft core Firm core Hard core

Predictability, performance, time to market

ADVANTAGES
Lower cost per gate.
Lower power consumption. Faster circuit operation. More reliable implementation. Smaller physical size. Greater design security. Easy-to-incorporate modern protocols and interfaces

DISADVANTAGE
Time-to-market demands. Exponential fabrication cost. Increased system complexity.

Increased verification requirements

APPLICATIONS
Speech signal processing
Image and video signal processing Information Technologies

Data Communications

CONCLUSION
While the potential is huge, the complexities are several, and countering these to offer successful designs is a true engineering challenge. A system-on-a-chip (SoC) can provide a single-chip solution, lower power usage, better performance, more frugal use of board real estate, simpler integration, and lower part counts. Compared to multichip solutions, the SoC has huge advantages, but mistakes in sizing on-chip resources require spinning the ASIC and result in high cost.