Table Of ContentWinning the SoC Revolution:
Experiences in Real Design
Winning the SoC Revolution:
Experiences in Real Design
Edited by:
Grant Martin
Cadence Labs
&
HenryChang
Cadence Labs
~ Springer
Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicaHon Data
Winning the SoC revolution: experlences In real design / edited by Grant Martin &
Henry Chang.
p. cm.
Includes bibllographlcal references and Index.
ISBN 978-1-4613-5042-2 ISBN 978-1-4615-0369-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-0369-9
1. Systems on a chip. 1. Martin. Grant (Grant Edmund) II. Chang. Henry.
Tk7895.E42W56 2003
004. 16-dc21
2003051413
@ 2003 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Springer Science+Business Media, inc. in 2003
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Contents
About the Editors Vll
Acknowledgements
IX
Preface
Xl
1. THE HISTORY OF THE SOC REVOLUTION
GRANT MARTIN
2. SOC DESIGN METHODOLOGIES 21
HENRY CHANG
3. NON-TECHNICAL ISSUES IN SOC DESIGN 47
RON WILSON
4. THE PHILIPS NEXPERIA DIGITAL VIDEO PLATFORM 67
J. AUGUSTO DE OLIVEIRA AND HANS VAN ANTWERPEN
5. THE TI OMAPTM PLATFORM APPROACH TO SOC 97
PETER CUMMING
6. SOC -THE mM MICROELECTRONICS APPROACH 119
KATHLEEN MCGRODDY-GOETZ, ROBERT DEVINS,
MICHAEL D. HALE, MARK KA UTZMAN, G. DAVID ROBERTS,
AND DWIGHT SULLIVAN
Contents
VI
7. PLATFORM FPGAS 141
PATRICK LYSAGHT
8. SOPC BUILDER: PERFORMANCE BY DESIGN 159
JESSE KEMPA, SHEAC Y LIM, CHRIS ROBINSON,
AND JOEL A. SEELY
9. STAR-IP CENTRIC PLATFORMS FOR SOC 187
JAY ALPHEY, CHRIS BAXTER, JON CONNELL,
JOHN GOODENOUGH, ANTONY HARRIS,
CHRISTOPHER LENNARD, BRUCE MATHEWSON,
ANDREW NIGHTINGALE, IAN THORNTON,
AND KATH TOPPING
10. REAL-TIME SYSTEM-ON-A-CHIP EMULATION 229
KIMMO KUUSILINNA, CHEN CHANG,
HANS-MARTIN BLUETHGEN, W RHETT DA VIS,
BRIAN RICHARDS, BORIVOlE NIKOLIC AND
ROBERT W BRODERSEN
11. TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGES FOR SOC DESIGN 255
JOHN M. COHN
Index 297
About the Editors
Grant Martin is a Fellow in the Labs of Cadence Design Systems. He
joined Cadence in late 1994. Before that, Grant worked for Burroughs in
Scotland for 6 years and NortellBNR in Canada for 10 years. He received
his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mathematics (Combinatorics and
Optimisation) from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1977 and 1978.
Grant is a co-author of the books Surviving the SOC Revolution: A
Guide to Platform-Based Design, published by Kluwer Academic
Publishers, in November of 1999, and System Design with SystemC,
published by Kluwer in May of 2002. He co-chaired the VSI Alliance
Embedded Systems study group in the summer of 2001. His particular areas
of interest include system-level design, System-on-Chip, Platform-Based
design, and embedded software.
Dr. Henry Chang received his Sc.B. degree in Electrical Engineering
(EE) from Brown University in 1989, his M.S. degree in EE from the
University of California at Berkeley (UCB) in 1992, and his Ph.D. in EE on
a "Top-Down, Constraint-Driven Design Methodology for Analog
Integrated Circuits" from UCB in 1994.
As an Architect at Cadence Design Systems, Inc. from 1995-2002 he has
worked on various activities related to system-on-a-chip (SoC). These
activities include SoC design methodologies, capabilities, tools, flows, and
standards looking at the general SoC problem as well as analog & mixed
signal IP design issues. He chaired the VSI Alliance Mixed-Signal
Development Working Group from 1996-2002 and co-chaired the group
Vlll About the Editors
until 2003. He is one of the co-authors of the book, Surviving the SOC
Revolution: A Guide to Platform-Based Design. Starting in. 2003, he has
been a Director in Cadence's Corporate Strategy group developing and
driving Cadence's long range business plans.
Acknowledgements
Grant Martin would like to acknowledge, as always, his wife Margaret
Steele, and his daughters Jennifer and Fiona. He would also like to
acknowledge the encouragement of his father and mother, John (Ted) and
Mary Martin.
Henry Chang would like to acknowledge his family -his wife Pora Park,
his son Daniel, and his parents Shih-hung & Pan-chin whose help in taking
care of Daniel made his contributions to this book possible.
Grant and Henry would also like to acknowledge all of the hard work by
the contributors of the chapters in this edited volume. Any mistakes found
should be regarded as the responsibility of the editors.
Preface
We are living through a revolution in the design of large complex
integrated circuits - the SoC revolution. When they first appeared in the
mid-1990's, System-on-Chip (SoC) was arguably just a marketing term. At
that point, the semiconductor fabrication process technology had achieved
the scales of 350 and 250 nm, allowing the integration of only relatively
simple digital systems. But, by the turn of the millennium, with 180, 150
and 130 nm processes available, many design teams were building true SoC
devices.
These devices are systems in every sense of the word. They incorporate
programmable processors (often with at least one RISC and one DSP),
embedded memory, function accelerators implemented in digital logic,
complex on-chip communications networks (traditional master-slave buses
as well as network-on-a-chip), large amounts of embedded software, both
hardware-dependent, middleware and applications, and analogue interfaces
to the external world.
But the design theories, methods and tools for designing, integrating and
verifying these complex systems have not kept pace with the advanced
semiconductor fabrication processes that allow us to build them. The well
known International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS)
analyses point to an ever-widening gap between what we are capable of
building, and what we are capable of designing. Many techniques have
been proposed and are being used to close that gap, including design tool
automation and integration from RTL to GDSH, integrated testbenches, IP
reuse, platform-based design, and, last but not least, system-level design
X11 Preface
techniques. These techniques grow in importance as the industry moves to
the 90, 65, 45 nm process technology nodes, and beyond.
Although commercial tool providers, large design companies, and
academic researchers are doing a good job of developing the theory and
practice of many of these techniques, there remains a considerable lack of
pragmatic knowledge among practitioners of the leading design
methodologies for SoC design. There have been many interesting
presentations about IP reuse and SoC at a number of the well-known
conferences, and, some seminal books have given introductions to many
aspects of reuse and SoC, but the real-world perspective of leading SoC
design teams has been missing.
In 1999, at the dawn of the SoC revolution, we published a book entitled,
Surviving the SOC Revolution: A Guide to Platform Based Design. At the
time, there were few industrial examples of true SoCs. The content we
provided came from intense thinking and a research and development project
that began in 1997 to develop methodologies for SoC and platform based
design. We are now in the middle of that revolution. Many industrial
examples do exist. Now the debate centres on what is the best approach for
SoC design, but there is now no doubt that SoCs are here to stay. It is now
time to win the SoC Revolution. We believe now, in the industry, that there
is enough design experience and know-how that we can do so. Therefore,
rather than writing the entire book ourselves as we did with Surviving the
SOC Revolution, we decided the best approach to this book would be as a
collected volume authored by the leading practitioners of SoC design.
Readers thus should consider this book to be a sequel to Surviving the
SOC Revolution, rather than a second edition of it. The two books
complement each other: Surviving the SOC Revolution focuses in detail on
all of the issues involved in SoC design, and gives many possible solutions
to designing them using the concept of platform-based design. This book,
Winning the SoC Revolution: Experiences in Real Design, focuses on know
how, experiences, and solutions. It is indeed possible to move on from mere
survival, to mastering SoC.
This book presents a variety of lessons and examples in SoC design,
indicating the key areas and most important design methodologies which are
considered essential to successfully developing large complex integrated
circuits. In Chapter 1, by Grant Martin, we have a brief history of the SoC
revolution and SoC development issues, including changing expectations,
new design paradigms and the role of important industry standards
