Low Cost Approach for System on Chip

Abstract

System on chip (SOC) has emerged to be one of the major components to reduce the cost of final product recently. When the SOC chip first entered the market 10 years back, despite a single chip solution, was in fact more expensive than the solution with multiple chips due to larger die area and bad yield. The technology development continually break through has created an opportunity to allow even more transistors to be packed in a chip with lesser die area and better yield. This prompted for cost effective product no choice but back to SOC single chip solution. However, just SOC chip solution is not enough to further reduce BOM cost as this type of chip could be very complex with large pin count. The customer has constantly demanded a low cost system solution regardless whether it is SOC chip. IC Design Company is no longer a semiconductor IC chip provider; it has to deliver system solution in order to secure customers. To help customers reduce cost, SOC, is inevitable to be one of the cost effective components as it greatly reduce the PCB size and thus the cost. However, In today consumer market, this is still not enough, lower cost effort has to be continued in order to cut the cost to satisfy the demanding consumers hungry for cheap and quality product. This paper studies the low cost approach for the SOC application.