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As SOC designs become more prevalent in the communication market, engineers find themselves integrating more microprocessor and IP cores on a single chip. The challenge is selecting the right interconnect architecture that easily links these cores together.
Five years ago, as the communication market began to blossom, the microprocessor was the heart of the system. At the time, the microprocessor was a single-chip solution that managed all operations within a communication design, forcing designers to engineer their systems around the processor and its interfaces.
Today, the processor is no longer the sole occupant of a communication chip. Through advances in process technology and engineering innovations, the microprocessor has become just one of the blocks on the silicon substrate that may include memory, other hardware controllers, functional engines, and even other processors. Thus, the processor has become one of the core elements in a system-on-chip (SOC) IC, which is commonly defined as a chip including at least one embedded processor along with memory and other functional units.
A bigger role
SOCs housing embedded microprocessors play unseen but vital roles in today's communication designs. They manage the flow of information in networking equipment, control all baseband functionality in wireless products, and serve as one of the main technologies bringing multimedia content to communication architectures.
The challenge for designers is developing SOCs within the tight timeframes put forward by today's OEM community. To meet these ever-shrinking market windows, designers outsource intellectual property (IP) designs or buy proven designs from independent SOC providers.
But this approach causes headaches. By turning to third-party IP, designers run the risk of integrating components that do not properly operate with the microprocessor core housed in their SOC. To alleviate this potential problem, designers must refocus their attention to the bus architecture implemented within the microprocessor core so that they can accommodate the third-party IP blocks required to develop their SOC.
Given the tremendous variety of SOC applications and SOC designers' almost unlimited capacity to mix and match third-party IP blocks and processor cores on a single chip, a single interconnect design no longer makes sense. Engineers need to explore new interconnect architecture approaches when developing SOC designs.
There are many types of interconnect architectures, which provide SOC designers with a wide...