Reflections on 10 Years as a Commercial On-Chip Interconnect Provider

Summary form only given. Sonics was founded in 1996, just as the term "system on a chip" began to enter the common semiconductor vernacular. The author identified the wide variety of heterogeneous components that would need to cooperate to satisfy embedded consumer and communications applications as a key challenge in completing SoC designs. Networking and telecommunications technologies seemed to offer the required abstraction, decoupling, and hard real-time performance guarantees that conventional computing approaches lacked. By early 1997, Sonics had become a licensor of active interconnect technology focused on SoC applications. This paper examines the changes the author has seen in SoC\´s, and how well those changes matched the predictions embodied in Sonics\´ products. It explores the key challenges in current embedded system design, and makes predictions about how such designs are likely to evolve