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CS269: HW/SW
Engineering of Embedded Systems, Winter02
Toward IP and Software
| Putting it all
together, you have the exponentially increasing transistors on a chip, ever
increasing but diverging products, which is really the driving force for all
these technology advances. There is
also the fact that every chip start is so expensive that one design has to
serve multiple products. The old
story of shorter time to market and shorter product cycle is also not getting
better. The logical conclusion is
that there will be plenty of so call “Intellectual property” reuse, where a
design company will buy a piece of
design from some IP vendors or borrow a piece of design from an old
product. And not just IP,
programmable and reconfigurable IP such as processor and DSP. After the chip, now considered a platform,
is designed and manufactured, there will need to be customization for
different standard protocols for different countries and geographical
regions, customization for each of the member of a product line,
customization for different product generations over a couple of years, and
customization for different products. |