Platforms support advanced integration

The widespread adoption of system-on-chip technology has broadened the application area for integrated circuit design. While first-generation SoCs combined different functions on a chip, today's system chips have to merge different features and capabilities to support quickly changing standards and a growing number of new applications, particularly in the communications market. Emerging applications such as wireless networks, portable systems and the traditional area of advanced system design require a new level of thinking and support.

An application-specific IC is a unique collection of capabilities-functions, services and interfaces-specifically tuned for a product or family of products implemented on a single chip. Many of these chips provide a wide range of capabilities. One of the key challenges is to determine which capabilities to provide and how to implement them most efficiently.

In most domains, there are multiple standards and protocols, different algorithms and evolving requirements.

Once the functions, services and interfaces are determined, work turns to implementation characteristics such as performance, die size, cost and power. They ultimately determine the viability of the chip in the target market.

Platform-based design is an emerging methodology that signifcantly increases the chances for success on application-specific IC projects. While platforms can mean many things, the most workable definition is an integration and development strategy for combining different hardware and software blocks into a single IC design.

The addition of programmable and customizable blocks into an SoC platform provides a far greater ability to tune the implementation characteristics of the chip for specific applications. As an example, consider an application-specific platform for third-generation (3G) wireless phones.

There are a number of standard components that would be part of any phone including the CPU, general memory system and peripherals. These are all fixed components that can be used as is, without further customization.

Outside of the baseline integration platform, the digital baseband, voice-processing and media-processing functions have specific performance requirements that must be balanced with the cost and power requirements of the overall system. These components are excellent candidates for application-specific customization to affect that balance. A customizable DSP architecture is ideally suited for these types of functions. Designers can determine how many and which functions should run on a target processor and then specifically optimize that processor for those functions.