System on Chip Age

One is now standing at the entrance gate of the System on Chip Age. The constant progress of VLSI technology enables many logical functions to be designed on one chip. Today, one can realize 32 bit CPU by using only 1/4 area of a chip. The real area is usually filled with the peripheral circuits, such as cache/main memory controller, registers, bus interfaces. The ratio of CPU area in a chip will steadily reduce to small percentage and various subsystem circuits will be designed on the major portion of the chip. This trend will continue for the coming decade.<>