System On A Chip

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System-on-a-chip or system on chip (SoC or SOC) refers to integrating all components of a computer or other Electronics system into a single integrated circuit (chip). It may contain Digital signal, Analog signal, Mixed-signal integrated circuits, 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. SoC is believed to be more cost effective since it increases the yield of the fabrication and because its packaging is simpler.

Structure

A typical SoC consists of:

One or more microcontroller, microprocessor or digital signal processor core(s).
Memory blocks including a selection of Read-only memory, Random access memory, EEPROM and Flash memory.
Timing sources including oscillators and phase-locked loops.
Peripherals including counter-timers, real-time timers and power-on reset generators.
External Electrical connectors including industry standards such as Universal Serial Bus, FireWire, Ethernet, USART, SPI.
Analog signal Electrical connectors including Analog to digital converters and Digital to analog converters.
Voltage regulators and power management circuits.

These blocks are connected by either a proprietary or industry-standard Computer bus such as the AMBA specification bus from ARM Ltd. Direct Memory Access controllers route data directly between external Electrical connectors and memory, by-passing the processor core and thereby increasing the data throughput of the SoC.

Design flow A SoC consists of the Computer hardware described above, and the Computer software that controls the microcontroller, microprocessor or digital signal processing 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 device drivers that control their operation. Of particular importance are the protocol stacks that drive industry-standard interfaces like USB. The hardware blocks are put together using computer aided design tools; the software Module (programming)s are integrated using a integrated development environment.

A key step in the design flow is emulation: the hardware is mapped onto an emulator based on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) that mimics the behavior of the SoC, and the software modules are loaded into the Random access memory of the emulation platform. Once programmed, the emulation platform enables the hardware and 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.

Chips are verified for logical correctness before being sent to foundry. The process is called ASIC verification. Verilog and VHDL are the Hardware Descriptive languages 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. Traditionally, 70% of time and energy in chip design life cycle are spent on verification.

Fabrication SoCs can be fabricated by several technology, 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.

However, like most VLSI designs, the total cost is higher for one large chip than for the same functionality distributed over several smaller chips, because of lower yields and higher Non-recurring engineering costs.

See also

List of system-on-a-chip suppliers
PSoC
Application-specific integrated circuit
Microcontroller
Electronic design automation
NES-on-a-chip

External links

SoC Article Series
TSC electric power meter IC- a typical mixed-signal system on chip
MIPS architecture-based SoCs at linux-mips.org
Embedded Processor and System-on-Chip Quick Reference Guide
System-on-a-Chip by www.SiliconFarEast.com
Navarre AsyncArt. Asynchronous System-on-Programmable-Chip Research & Services. Public University of Navarre
HybridThreads(Hthreads) Programmatically building semi-custom multiprocessor systems-on-chip using hybrid CPU/FPGA components.
Systems-on-chip using hybrid CPU/FPGA components.
Soc ARM Inside by www.tertiumtechnology.com

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