System-on-a-chip
From Free net encyclopedia
System-on-a-chip (SoC or SOC) is an idea of integrating all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio-frequency functions – all on one chip. A typical application is in the area of embedded systems.
If it is not feasible to construct an SoC for a particular application, an alternative is a system in package (SiP) comprising a number of chips in a single package.
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SOC structure
A typical SoC consists of:
- one or more microcontroller, microprocessor or DSP core(s)
- memory blocks including a selection of ROM, RAM, EEPROM and Flash
- Timing sources including oscillators and phase-locked loops
- Peripherals including counter-timers, real-time timers and power-on reset generators
- External interfaces including industry standards such as USB, FireWire, Ethernet, USART, SPI
- Analog interfaces including ADCs and DACs
- Voltage regulators and power management circuits
These blocks are connected by either a proprietary or industry-standard bus such as the AMBA bus from ARM. DMA controllers route data directly between external interfaces and memory, by-passing the processor core and thereby increasing the data throughput of the SoC.
Block diagram
Design flow
An SoC consists of the hardware described above, but also of the software that controls the microcontroller, microprocessor or DSP cores, peripherals and interfaces. The design flow for an SoC aims to develop this hardware and software in parallel.
Most SoCs are developed from pre-qualified blocks for the hardware elements described above, together with the software drivers the control their operation. Of particular importance are the protocol stacks that drive industry-standard interfaces like USB. The hardware blocks are put together using CAD tools; the software modules are integrated using a software development environment.
A key step in the SoC design flow is emulation: the hardware is mapped onto an emulation platform based on a FPGA that then mimics the behavior of the SoC, and the software modules are loaded into the memory of the emulation platform. Once programmed, the emulation platform enables both the hardware and the software of the SoC to be tested and debugged at close to its full operational speed.
After emulation the hardware of the SoC follows the place and route phase of the design of an integrated circuit before it is fabricated.
Design flow diagram
Fabrication
SoCs can be fabricated by several technologies, including:
SoC designs usually consume less power and have a lower cost and higher reliability than the multi-chip systems that they replace. And with fewer packages in the system, assembly costs are reduced as well.
Suppliers
- Actions Semiconductor
- Atmel
- Cirrus Logic
- Cypress Semiconductors
- Freescale
- Imagination Technologies
- Samsung
- Sharp
- Silicon Motion
- STMicroelectronics
- Teridian Semiconductor
- Texas Instruments
See also
External links
- SoC Article Series
- TSC electric power meter IC- a typical mixed-signal system on chip
- MIPS-based SoCs at linux-mips.org
Template:Compu-hardware-stub ASIC Verification: Chips are verified for their logical correctness before sending them to foundry. The process is called ASIC verification. Verilog and VHDL are the Hardware Descriptive langauages used for verification. With growing complexity of Chips HVLs like SystemVerilog, SystemC, e, Vera are used. The bugs found in the verification stage are reported to the designer. Traditonally 70% of time and energy in Chip design life cycle are spent on Verification.
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