The era of many-modules SoC

Abstract

Due to technology scaling, it is expected that future chips would integrate tens to hundreds of functional units. The growing power and design costs limit the benefit of continuously increasing the universality and complexity of these units and motivate the usage of specialized hardware modules. These modules are likely to be replicated in order to exploit the inherent parallelism of many tasks. This trend already exists in CMPs (moving from multi-core to many-cores), ASSPs and FPGAs.