EDA Tech Forum

Today’s pressures on time-to-market make outsourcing a bottom line issue, says Phil Casini of interconnect specialist Sonics.

We are now entering the tail end of an era, and many of us do not even know it. For as long as there have been microprocessors, there have been engineers and engineering teams whose job it was to create interconnects. Although this will undoubtedly continue in some companies, the increasing complexity of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) means this is making less and less sense. I say this not only as an executive of a company specializing in SoC solutions, but as someone who has participated in the industry’s evolution for 25 years.

Just a few short years ago, SoC design was relatively straightforward. Consider the original DVD player, essentially a decoding system. The major decision point was the choice of embedded processor. Any logic added was complementary and easily verifiable. Today, digital consumer electronics are a lot more sophisticated. The convergence of latency-dependent data communications and high throughput digital multimedia streaming has caused a shift in SoC design architectures from single to multiprocessing, subsystem-style designs. High-end cell phones, for example, include mobile video processing, games processing, and highly complex communications capabilities. These new features have caused multiple heterogeneous processing elements to become commonplace on single devices, and as a result exponentially increase the complexity of data flows. SoC architectures have now shifted from data processing-centric to data flow-centric.