Displaying posts in the categorySoC Design
SoC Design articles
Tutorials
An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) and an SoC (system on chip) go through the same broad design flow, from specification to production, but an SoC takes roughly twice as long. In the infographic below, a focused ASIC runs about 12 to 24 months from specification to production, while a large SoC runs about 24 to 48 months. The extra time comes from integration: an SoC combines CPUs, GPUs, memory, licensed IP and software, and every…
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Murugavel Ganesan
March 04, 2026
Tutorials
A Product Requirements Document (PRD) for a semiconductor product states what the chip is, why it matters, who it serves and how success will be measured, without saying how it will be built. It is the document that supports the go/no-go decision before a team commits millions to design and tape-out, and it stays the reference point through architecture, design, verification and launch. A good PRD is short, grounded in data, solution-agnostic an…
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Murugavel Ganesan
July 11, 2025
SoC Design
In chip and system design, PPA (performance, power and area) are the three numbers every team argues about. You can usually improve any one of them, but almost never without paying for it in the other two. Image: SemiWiki The catch is that the best chip on paper is not always the best product in the market. From ADAS processors to AI accelerators, a PPA trade-off is a business decision as much as an engineering one. The wrong choice can hu…
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Murugavel Ganesan
July 08, 2025
Tutorials
A System on a Chip (SoC) is a single integrated circuit that holds most of the parts of an electronic system: processor cores, graphics, memory controllers, on-chip memory, connectivity and dedicated accelerators, all joined by an on-chip interconnect. Putting them on one die makes a device smaller, cheaper to build in volume and far more power-efficient than the same functions spread across separate chips. That is why the phone, watch, car dash…
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 05, 2025
Technology
Chiplets are smaller dies, each built for one job (compute, I/O, memory, accelerators), that are assembled in one package and behave as a single system-on-chip. Instead of one very large monolithic die, a chiplet SoC splits the design, builds each part on the process node that suits it, tests each die before assembly, and joins them with dense die-to-die links on a silicon interposer, a bridge or a direct 3D bond. The result is better yield and …
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 08, 2024
SoC Design
A software-defined vehicle (SDV) is a car whose features, behaviour and safety functions are defined mainly by software running on a small number of powerful central computers, rather than by dozens of fixed-function electronic control units. As the industry moves from the Internal Combustion Engine, the heart of the vehicle becomes what this post calls the Internal Compute Engine: the processors, accelerators and networks that run driver assist…
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Murugavel Ganesan
October 15, 2023
Verification
Design for Debug (DFD) means building features into a chip, and habits into the design flow, that make failures quick to find after silicon arrives. The ten strategies that do the most to manage debug complexity are: a modular architecture, standard interfaces, careful trace signal selection, abstraction during pre-silicon verification, design reuse, verification metrics to guide debug logic, detailed documentation, regular design reviews, DFT f…
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Murugavel Ganesan
March 19, 2023
