Area - time - power and design effort: the basic tradeoffs in application specific systems

Application specific is always a tradeoff among competing design goals (or design parameters). In addition to the well established area (cost) - time (performance) - power metrics specific applications imply a relatively limited market so design cost becomes an especially important consideration. As technology offers increasing transistor density with lower cost power constraints limit frequency as the primary avenue to performance. The alternative is to use area (transistors) to recover performance putting an additional strain on the design budget. The search for flexibility in design without paying a significant area - time - power cost remains the primary problem for application specific and system on a chip (SoC) design.