Introduction to ASIC - SoC Design

1.     Introduction to ASIC - SoC Design

An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is an integrated circuit (IC) customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed solely to run a cell phone is an ASIC.

As feature sizes have shrunk and design tools improved over the years, the maximum complexity (and hence functionality) possible in an ASIC has grown from 5,000 gates to over 100 million. Modern ASICs often include entire 32-bit processors, memory blocks including ROM, RAM, EEPROM, Flash and other large building blocks. Such an ASIC is often termed a SoC (system-on-a-chip). Designers of digital ASICs use a hardware description language (HDL), such as Verilog or VHDL, to describe the functionality of ASICs.

SoC is a collection of components and/or subsystems (designed as Ips, ASICs) interconnected to perform the specified functions. Entire system is built on a single piece of silicon. SoC includes a processor, memory, DSP Cores, IO devices, interfaces to external circuitry, and custom IPs as Verilog or VHDL modules.

 

SoC consists of Very large transistor counts on a single IC. Mixed technologies, mixed design on the same chip are commonly used. They include – Digital, analog, FPGA, full custom, semi-custom, etc. A SoC usually contains one or more processors and co-processors, internal memory and memory controllers for external memory, buses/interconnect architectures such as AMBA, peripherals (timer, interrupt controller, etc.), I/O channels amd many more.

 

Thus SoC is essentially a mixture of ASIC, including full-custom and semi-custom (standard cells), reusable Intellectual Property (IP) blocks (also called macro, hard macro, cores) as shown in below diagram.

 

IP core based design approach mainly intended for reducing design complexity and time to market. There are different IP cores supplied by different vendors in different technologies of different specifications. Customizable soft cores provides essential set of preverified parameters to cinfigure acording to the customer requirement Interface logic generally support standard buses to ease integration. Bus-based architectures such as IBM core-connect, Motorola IP-bus, ARM's advanced microcontroller bus architecture (AMBA), etc that facilitate core-based SoC design.