Portable Multimedia SoC Design: a Global Challenge

The intrinsic capability brought by each new technology node opens the way to a broad range of system integration options and continuously enables new applications to be integrated in a single device to the point that almost everything seems possible. In reality the difference between a successful design and a failure resides today more then ever in the ability of the design team to properly master all the critical design factors at once. In essence, today´s system on chip design represent a multidiscipline challenge that spans from architecture through design to test and finally mass production. SoC design for portable applications has to cope with very unique constraints that normally greatly challenge the ability of an organization and most of the times of an entire company to fully master its industrialization capabilities and pushes concurrent design to new limits. In the end, only a well thought out Architecture followed by best practices design techniques with a high level of understanding of the manufacturing constraints and excellent logistics can result in a device that can be produced in the volume required by the cell phone industry today. This paper will try to capture how these challenges have been addressed to design the family of Application Processing Engines named Nomadiktrade. The paper will specifically focus on the third generation device labeled STn8815S22 where the integration capabilities of silicon technology have been pared with those of System in Package design to provide and extremely compact and effective System on Chip for portable multimedia applications. An overview of the main success factors and challenges will be presented driving the reader from the Architecture conception through the chip industrialization. Both silicon design and packaging design will be illustrated, highlighting those techniques that made this incredible product a reality