Industry Articles
Optimize SoC Design with a Network-on-Chip Strategy-August 28, 2023 |
By Andy Nightingale, Arteris
Utilizing physically aware interconnect IP from trusted third-party vendors can reduce design time and increase productivity.
Today’s system-on-chip (SoC) devices can contain hundreds of millions to over a hundred billion transistors, depending on the application. The only way to create designs of this complexity is to employ large numbers of functional blocks called intellectual-property (IP) blocks or IPs.
Many of these blocks embody well-known and standard functions, such as processor cores, communication cores (Ethernet, USB, I2C, SPI, etc.) and peripheral processes. Rather than spend valuable time and resources re-implementing these functions from scratch, SoC design teams acquire these IPs from respected third-party vendors.
Access to robust, tested, and proven IP speeds up the development process and reduces risk. Using third-party IP for common functions frees the SoC design team to focus on their own “secret sauce” IP blocks, which will differentiate their SoC from competitive offerings.