Reflections on 10 Years as a Commercial On-Chip Interconnect Provider

Abstract

Summary form only given. Sonics was founded in 1996, just as the term "system on a chip" began to enter the common semiconductor vernacular. The author identified the wide variety of heterogeneous components that would need to cooperate to satisfy embedded consumer and communications applications as a key challenge in completing SoC designs. Networking and telecommunications technologies seemed to offer the required abstraction, decoupling, and hard real-time performance guarantees that conventional computing approaches lacked. By early 1997, Sonics had become a licensor of active interconnect technology focused on SoC applications. This paper examines the changes the author has seen in SoC's, and how well those changes matched the predictions embodied in Sonics' products. It explores the key challenges in current embedded system design, and makes predictions about how such designs are likely to evolve