Application-Specific Core-Based Systems

Abstract

The architecture of digital integrated systems has evolved at a very fast pace, tracking microelectronics technology. In the LSI era, when the integration limit was of a few thousands of transistors, chips contained simple, general-purpose functional blocks, like ALUs, shift registers, small microcontrollers. A distinctive characteristic of early integrated circuits was their internal homogeneity: Almost all transistors where dedicated to a single task. In particular, separation between computation and storage was quite rigorous, logic (i.e., computation) chips did not contain a significant amount of memory and vice-versa.