EDA Tech Forum

Today more than ever, the difference between design success and failure resides in engineers’ ability to master all critical design factors at once. Meanwhile, systems-on-chip (SoCs) represent a multidisciplinary challenge that spans the entire flow from architecture through design to test and finally mass production. For portable applications in particular, SoCs present especially stringent constraints that challenge the ability of any organization to fully master its industrialization capabilities and push concurrent design strategies to new limits. Only the combination of a well thought-out architecture, best-practice design techniques, a high level of understanding of the manufacturing constraints, and excellent logistics can deliver the devices that can be produced to the volume requirements of the cellular phone industry. This paper describes how these challenges have been addressed by STMicroelectronics in the design of its family of Nomadik multimedia application processing engines. It specifically focuses on a third generation part, the STn8815S22, where the integration capabilities of silicon technology were coupled with those of system-in-package design to produce an extremely compact and effective SoC for portable multimedia applications.