Chapter 2. The SOC Design Flow

Our primary tools for comprehending and controlling complex objects are structure and abstraction

—Niklaus Wirth

SOC design techniques are layered upon ASIC design methods. Therefore, any proposed system-design style intended for SOCs must be compatible with ASIC design flows. A truly practical SOC design style must, in fact, seamlessly dovetail with the ASIC design flow. Such a design style should not require the SOC design team to learn and use radically new design tools. Some newly proposed system-design approaches such as so-called “C-to-gates,” behavioral synthesis, reconfigurable-logic, and design methods based on the use of reconfigurable processors attempt to overcome shortcomings in existing SOC design techniques that have developed over the last 30 years. However, these design styles have not achieved wide acceptance because they either have significant shortcomings of their own or they require SOC designers to learn new and radically different ways to design systems.

The processor-centric MPSOC (multi-processor SOC) design style advocated in this book does indeed dovetail nicely with the existing ASIC design flow. It does not require SOC designers to learn radically new ways to design systems. It does ask SOC designers to unshackle their thinking from the many limitations previously imposed by 20th-century microprocessors and processor cores discussed in Chapter 1.