A Decade of Platform-Based Design: A look backwards, a look forwards

Abstract

It has been 10 years since a group of us wrote the book “Surviving the SoC Revolution: A Guide to Platform-Based Design”, and almost a decade since I gave a talk at VLSI 2000 in Kolkata about this theme. The intervening time has seen considerable development in the platform based design approach. It has become the near ubiquitous approach to the development of complex SoCs for many application areas. It has branched out from its original, mainly hardware-centric focus, to assume much more of a system and software focus complementing hardware. And the nature of platform architectures have changed: we now see many more embedded processors of all kinds in SoC platforms, from application-specific processors (ASIPs) to clusters of homogeneous or heterogeneous processing engines and many integrated subsystems each including one or more ASIPs or general purpose cores. This talk will look back at the past decade in platform based design and describe the evolution of architectures, design approaches and tools, and also look forward at the next decade or two and try to paint some possible scenarios for the future evolution of the platform-based approach. As we move towards new generations of design tools and higher level design approaches, what will be the main forms of platforms in future and how will designers use them?