Industry Expert Blogs

We like to blog about how technology changes our lives and will continue to do so. And, it is exciting to see Synopsys leading the semiconductor industry and pioneering new solutions.

For many years System on Chip (SoC) integrators have faced the challenge of packing more and more features into their designs, of course using fewer resources and within a shorter time frame. Synopsys has lead the way offering a broad range of SoC IP cores. We are now taking the next step with the introduction of the Industry’s First Complete Audio IP Subsystem that enables designers to cope with the continued increase in SoC design and audio complexity.

Talking with customers we found that what really drives system complexity is software. There is a lot of software in SoCs today, and the amount is growing. This is increasing the design task and in many ways making the hardware IP implementation almost easy by comparison. Of course, all of this software has to be integrated into the applications software that is running on the host-processor, and then everything has to be verified. From the chart below you can see that the number of IP blocks per SoC is growing rapidly, and will continue to do so. What the chart doesn’t tell you is that the amount of software required to support all of these IP blocks is growing even faster. Certainly, the number of IP blocks in SoCs has lead to a lot of discussion in the press about subsystems. What you don’t often see is the real motivator behind the trend to subsystems, and that is software and the integration of the software to make an SoC. A subsystem is more than IP cores and has to include the full software solution, or it will be of limited value.

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