Abstract
The design of heterogeneous Systems-on-Chips (SoC) in very deep submicron technologies has become a very complex task that has to bridge very high level system descriptions with low-level considerations due to technology defaults and variations, and increasing system and circuit complexity. This paper describes the major low-level issues, such as dynamic and static power consumption, temperature, technology variations, interconnect, Design for Manufacturing (DFM), reliability and yield, and their impact on high-level design, such as the design of multi-V dd , fault-tolerant, redundant or adaptive chip architectures. Some multi-processor based SoC (MPSoC) cases are also presented in three domains in which heterogeneity is large: wireless sensor networks, vision sensors and mobile TV. These examples also highlight the heterogeneous nature and the increasing complexity at circuit-level, with the extension from CMOS-only SoCs towards MEMS-and-CMOS SoCs.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the CSEM design teams that contributed to the SoC cases described above: Claude Arm, Flavio Rampogna, Silvio Todeschini, Ricardo Caseiro of the “SoC and Digital Group”, Pierre-François Ruedi, Edoardo Franzi, François Kaess, Eric Grenet, Pascal Heim, Pierre Alain Beuchat, of the “Vision Sensor Group”, D. Ruffieux, F. Pengg, M. Kucera, A. Vouilloz, J. Chabloz, M. Contaldo, F. Giroud, N. Raemy of the “RF and Analog IC Group” and E. Le Roux, P. Volet of the “Digital Radio Group”.
The authors also wish to acknowledge the EU project MAP2 partners (CRAFT-031984), i.e. OFFIS, ChipVision, Politecnico di Torino and BullDAST, for the design methodologies described in Sect. 3. The authors also acknowledge the industrial contributions from Hager and Semtech for the WiseNET SoC, and Abilis for the MACGIC-based SoC for mobile TV.
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Piguet, C. et al. (2012). Trends in Design Methods for Complex Heterogeneous Systems. In: Nicolescu, G., O'Connor, I., Piguet, C. (eds) Design Technology for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1125-9_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1125-9_9
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