Chapter 13. Using Fixed Processor Cores in SOC Designs

The requirement for processing power will be 1000× in the next ten years.

—International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors: 2005.

Designer-defined Xtensa processor cores and pre-configured Diamond cores are SOC building blocks. It’s critically important for the SOC design team to have the most flexible building blocks available to maximize the team’s ability to reach project performance goals while staying within budget and on schedule. However, it’s also critically important for the design team to employ productive system-design strategies that effectively and efficiently use those building blocks. Many SOC design teams employ system-design strategies rooted in the previous century. These design strategies were developed when ASIC gate counts were in the hundreds of thousands, long before SOCs broke the million-gate threshold. Consequently, these strategies are now obsolete. They cannot make the design-team members sufficiently productive to produce mega-gate SOC designs economically.