Design of Processor-Based SoC

Abstract

Integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing technologies have reached today a maturity level which is the driving force for the development of sophisticated, multi-functional and high-performance electronic systems. According to the prediction of the 2003 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) [76], by year 2018 the half pitch1 of dynamic random access memories (DRAM), microprocessors and application-specific ICs (ASIC) will drop to 18 nm and the microprocessor physical gate length will drop to 7 nm. The implementation of correctly operating electronic circuits in such small geometries — usually referred to as Very Deep Submicron (VDSM) manufacturing technologies — was believed, just a few years ago, to be extremely difficult, if at all possible, due to major hurdles imposed by the fundamental laws of microelectronics physics when circuit elements are manufactured in such small dimensions and with such small distances separating them. Despite these skeptical views, VDSM technologies are successfully used today to produce high performance circuits and continue providing evidence that Moore’s law is still valid.KeywordsDigital Signal ProcessorSoft CoreDynamic Random Access MemoryHardware Description LanguageEmbed ProcessorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.