An Industry Perspective on Current and Future State of the Art in System-on-Chip (SoC) Technology

Abstract

In fast-moving consumer electronics markets where product lifetimes may be measured in months rather than years, fast time-to-market development of the system-on-chip solutions that lie at the heart of these products has become critical to commercial success. New semiconductor process technologies have the potential to integrate ever greater functional complexity onto realistically priced silicon chips. Yet there still remains a significant design gap between what can theoretically be integrated onto silicon and what can be efficiently designed onto it. In addition, the advent of sub-100-nm process technologies has seen an end to the speed and power consumption scaling that the industry has been used to. This paper examines the current state of the art in SoC technology and identifies some of the challenges that lie ahead if the relentless progress of Moore's Law is to continue fuelling ever more advanced and affordable consumer electronics products. It also looks at the system-in-package solutions that are increasingly being used to achieve levels of functional integration that Moore's Law on its own cannot provide.