System

on chip is an integrated circuit (IC) that integrates all components of an electronic system into a single chip An IC that integrates the major functional elements of a complete end-product into a single chip. is the efforts to integrate different types of silicon IPs on to the same chip, like memory, P, random logics, and analog circuitry. LPC2103 microcontroller
SOC

= chip + software + Integration

Typically SOC consists of hardware and software.

Hardware: Analog: ADC,DAC,PLL,TxRx Digital: Processor(DSP,P), Interface(bus), Accelerator Storage: SRAM,DRAM,ROM Peripheral : Input/output Software:
Operating System driver ,firmware ,compiler ,simulator

Characteristics of SOC
Very large transistor counts on a single chip
As of 2012, the highest transistor count in a commercially available chip is over 2.5 billion transistors

Mixed technology on a single chip

Digital,analog,FPGA

Multiple clock frequencies Hierarchical design with embedded reusable IP cores.

Yesterday

Voice only; 2 processors 4 year product life cycle

 Lower

power consumption Smaller physical size Faster circuit operation Increase performance Reduce overall system cost Paves the way for new developers to enter into the market for consumer oriented way.

 Time-to-market fabrication

demands

cost chip complexity <gate count ,heterogeneous device technology>

Economical Foundries

more and more expensive Silicon vendors concentrate on big customers with big quantities Malfunction will cost a lot of money and time Technical Requires high skill to integrate blocks of different suppliers

 Time

and design effort required to integrate different types of components on a single chip is going to be difficult

How

to overcome this DIFFICULTY Design reuse to reduce time to market

Use of parts from previous designs Making use of parts designed by third parties(IP vendors)

 One

solution to the design productivity gap is reusing segments of previously manufactured chips.
segments are known as blocks, macros, cores or cells.

This

The

blocks can either be developed in-house or licensed from an IP company. Each part of the soc block is supplied to the developer in three forms(soft,firm,hard). Soft ,firm , hard cores

 Each

part of the block is supplied to the developers in a complete and flexible description in synthesizable or hard form. The part of the SoC may be previously generated chips. The difference between ASIC and SOC is all building blocks of ASIC are comes from single supplier while SoC comes from different suppliers.

The following companies supply their pre built chip for SoC development.

ARM Microprocessor
MIPS Video processing chip

Rambus Memory
Imagination technologies Graphics Chips CEVADSP processing chip

Speech Signal Processing . Image and Video Signal Processing . Information Technologies
PC interface (USB, PCI,PCI-Express, IDE,..etc) Computer peripheries (printer control, LCD monitor controller, DVD controller,.etc) .

Data Communication
Wireline Communication: 10/100 Based-T, xDSL, Gigabit Ethernet,.. Etc Wireless communication: BlueTooth, WLAN, 2G/3G/4G, WiMax, UWB,etc