10 Tips for Successful SOC Design

10 Tips for Successful SOC Design

SOC designs are major projects. They can produce high-volume, immensely profitable chips but not without risk, as is true for any big project. Most SOC design projects do not complete on time or on budget. Too many are not completed at all. Although there is some risk involved, the rewards for success are great. These 10 tips will help your team find the path to a successful SOC design.

One way to ensure SOC design success is to start out in the right direction. That's the purpose of this White Paper-to help you start out in the right direction. As the most flexible vendor of customizable processor IP cores, Tensilica is committed to helping you and your team success with your next SOC design project just as we have worked with and helped many companies produce their own immensely successful SOCs. The following ten SOC design tips come straight from the hard-won experience we have gotten from working with our customers on many types of SOC design projects for wireless, multimedia, communications, networking, computing, and storage applications.

1. First, determine the pins-out speeds and feeds for the SOC

You and your design team cannot start on the design path without first knowing something about what you're planning to accomplish. A pins-out specification of the SOC's most important speeds and feeds will help you bound the design problem. Will the SOC handle video? HD or standard-definition video? Audio? How many audio channels? 2, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1, 8.1, or 10.1 channels? Will there be networking ports? How many? What speeds? 10/100/1000 megabits/second? What other design requirements must the SOC meet? You cannot start down the path to success until you nail down the SOC's most important speeds and feeds.

In addition, some speeds-and-feeds requirements will force you to make key decisions. For example, if your design will require the use of 400-MHz DDR2/3 RAM chips, then you had best plan to buy a proven PHY interface for DDR memory and you will need to use a sufficiently advanced IC fabrication process technology to support that data rate.

2. Start with a 10,000-foot (3000 metre) block diagram

A high-level block diagram is the place to make sure all of the team members from engineering, marketing, and management are on the same page. At this level, the block diagram describes what you want to do with the SOC, but not necessarily exactly how you will do it.

3. Decide how much RTL you're willing to create

You and your design team must realize that the hardware design is no longer the largest factor in overall design of the SOC. The average SOC design project now devotes 70% of project resources to verification. One reason for this unhappy statistic is because many SOC designers are so good at and so eager to reinvent the wheel. If you and your team wish to avoid the verification quagmire that has swallowed more than a few SOC design projects, then you need to decide early in the project how much new custom logic your team is willing to develop and verify. Also, don't forget that someone will also need to develop production tests for all the new logic blocks as well. The alternative to developing new logic blocks is to use predesigned, preverified hardware IP blocks with existing test vectors. The use of such predesigned IP blocks saves considerable design time and greatly reduces design risk.