This document is a compilation of my notes for COE 838: System on Chip Design at TMU. All information comes from my professor’s lectures, as well as the course textbooks.

Adam Szava - 2tor.ca

W2024

• Table of Contents

Lecture 1: Introduction to System-on-Chip

Introduction and Example

System on Chip (SoC) design beings with defining what a SoC is:

• An integrated circuit (IC) that integrates multiple hardware components and functionalities of a system onto a single chip.

• Various subsystems are integrated into a single die, such as: CPUs (potentially multiple processing units), memory, IO, peripherals.

• In addition to ICs, SoC consists of software and interconnection structure for integration.

  

• SoC may consist of all or some of the following:

  • CPU cores
    • Could have one processor, or maybe more.
    • Including DSPs, u processors, u controllers
  • On-chip memory (IP)
  • On-chip interconnection (busses, networks)
  • Analog circuits
  • Accelerators or application specific HW modules (IP)
  • ASICs Logics (application specific ICs)
  • Software (OS, application)
  • Firmware

For example, the S3C6410 SoC:

• It uses a RISC low power, high performance micro-processor
• It has many cores which are made for specialized applications, such as:
  • communications services
  • video processing
  • display control
  • Multi format codec, support encoding and decoding MPEG4

<aside> 💡 Codec:

A codec, short for "coder-decoder," is a software or hardware component that performs the encoding and decoding of digital data streams. Codecs are essential for various multimedia applications, such as audio and video processing, where data needs to be efficiently compressed for storage or transmission and then decompressed for playback.

MPEG4:

MPEG-4, short for Moving Picture Experts Group-4, is a widely used video compression standard that belongs to the MPEG group, a working committee of experts that develops standards for the coding and compression of audio and video. MPEG-4 was first introduced in 1998 and has gone through several revisions and extensions. It is known for its flexibility and ability to handle a variety of multimedia content, including audio, video, and interactive content.

</aside>

The following diagram shows the different subsystems within the Samsung S3C6410:

The Development of SoCs

The evolution of System-on-Chip (SoC) technology from traditional circuit boards is a significant development that has transformed the landscape of electronic devices. Let's explore the key stages in this evolution:

1. Individual Components on Boards:
   • Early electronic devices and computers consisted of discrete components mounted on circuit boards. These components included individual transistors, resistors, capacitors, and other discrete elements. The boards were relatively simple and lacked the integration seen in modern SoCs.