Components of SoC –
Design flow of SoC
SoC
• SoC - System On Chip
• Components connected on a Printed Circuit Board
can be integrated onto a single chip.
• VLSI manufacturing technology advances has made
possible to put millions of transistors on a single die.
Need
• An SoC provides greater design security at
hardware and firmware levels.
• An SoC provides faster execution due to high speed
processor and memory.
SoC Building
•Blocks
System on chip - processor at its core - It can be a
microcontroller, a microprocessor, a digital signal
processor, or an application specific instruction set
processor.
• Chip must have its memories - perform computation -
It
may have RAM, ROM, EEPROM, or even a flash
memory.
• External interfaces - standard communication
protocols
such as USB, Ethernet, and HDMI. It can also
incorporate wireless technology and involve protocols
pertaining to WiFi and Bluetooth.
SoC Building
Blocks
• It will also need a GPU or a Graphical Processing
Unit in order to help visualize the interface.
• Other stuff that an SoC may have includes voltage
regulators, phase lock loop control systems and
oscillators, clocks and timers, analog to digital and
digital to analog converters, etc.
• Internal interface bus or a network to connect all the
individual block
Components of SOC :
• An SoC is specially designed to meet the standards of incorporating the
required electronic circuits of numerous computer components onto a
single integrated chip.
• Instead of a system that assembles several chips and components onto
a circuit board, the SoC fabricates all necessary circuits into one unit.
• The challenges of an SoC include higher prototyping and architecture
costs, more complex debugging and lower IC yields. IC is not cost
effective and takes time to manufacture. However, this is likely to
change as the technology continues to be developed and employed
• SoC is a complete electronic substrate system that may contain
analog, digital, mixed-signal or radio frequency functions.
• Its components usually include a graphical processing unit (GPU),
a central processing unit (CPU) that may be multi-core, and
system memory (RAM).
• Because SOC includes both the hardware and software, it uses
less power, has better performance, requires less space and is
more reliable than multi-chip systems.
• Most system-on-chips today come inside mobile devices like
smartphones and tablets
An SoC usually contains various components such as:
• Operating system
• Utility software applications
• Voltage regulators
• power management circuits
• Timing sources such as phase lock loop control systems
• oscillators
• Microprocessor
• microcontroller or digital signal processor
• RAM and ROM memory
• Peripherals such as real-time clocks
• counter timers
• power-on-reset generators
• External interfaces such as USB
• FireWire
• Ethernet
• universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter or serial peripheral
interface bus
• Analog interfaces such as digital-to-analog converters and
• Analog-to-digital converters
DESIGN FLOW OF SOC
SYSTEM DESIGN
SoC
Custom made FPGA based SoC
SoC
Qualcomm® Xilinx® Zynq®
Snapdragon™ Apple® M1 intel®
NXP® i.MX Agilex™
Custom made SoC
• ASIC.
• Designed by integrating IP blocks.
• Entire system fabricated on a single Silicon wafer.
• Eg:
• Qualcomm® Snapdragon™
• Apple® M1
• NXP® i.MX
• Broadcom® BCM
• Samsung® Exynos™
FPGA based SoC
• These are normal FPGA but with a hard processor core.
• They have configurable blocks (of FPGA) and processor core(of a
µP) in a single chip.
• Eg:
• Xilinx® Zynq®
• intel® Agilex™
Architecture of Zynq-
7000S
Image credits:
Xilinx
NXP I.MX 8 series
Image credits:
NXP
RISC V
• Open-Source Instruction set Architecture.
• Anybody can design RISCV based SoC
• Recent growth.
• SiFive's Custom RISC V SoC
• https://scs.sifive.com/core-designer
• IITM Shakti Processors
Advantages
• Essentially the great benefits of using an SoC are
power saving, space saving and cost reduction
• SoCs are also much more efficient as systems as
their performance is maximized per watt
• Systems on chip also tend to minimize the latency
provided the various elements are strategically
placed on the motherboard in order to minimize
interference and interconnection delays as well as
speed up the data transmission process
Disadvantages
• Initial cost of design and development is very high. If
the number of SoCs is small, the cost per SoC will be
very high.
• Even a single transistor or system damage may prove to
be very costly as the complete board has to be replaced,
and its servicing is very expensive.
• Integrating all systems on single chip increases
complexity.
• It is not suitable for power-intensive applications.
