Abstract :
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
Keywords :
embedded systems; logic design; multiprocessor interconnection networks; system-on-chip; SoC; Sonics; commercial on-chip interconnect provider; embedded system design; system-on-chip design; Acoustic reflection; Computer networks; Design automation; Embedded system; Integrated circuit interconnections; Network-on-a-chip; Protocols; System-on-a-chip; Systems engineering and theory; Telecommunication computing;
