Current silicon technology is capable of fabricating 10’s of millions of gates on a single chip.
The onset of advanced Silicon lithography techniques and the endless drive for more cost margins is driving this trend upwards and to the right at an incredible rate.
This development, however, comes at a high price. Key challenges offered by the onset of new technologies includes power management, critical circuit performance e.g. mixed signal and analogue performance when mixed with vast amounts of digital gates, cost of design and design efficiency.
Typical modern systems take an enormous amount of resource to develop and bring to market. Silicon designs using linewidths of 90nm and 65nm and below can consume multi-million dollars in the development phase alone. All of this money needs to be recovered during the volume business phase otherwise the development is futile. Time to market is therefore crucial. This is particularly apparent in today’s consumer markets where windows of opportunity can be measured in weeks and months rather than years.
In leading edge systems designs, an increasingly large amount of effort is put into moving development from the hardware environment towards the software domain. This is particularly apparent within the board level system designs where re-configurable devices such as FPGAs are used to build platform style designs which have use in a variety of different markets. Whilst this has been in place within SLI for a number of years, we are now seeing high levels of migration within the SoC and SiP communities.
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