Sustainable (re-) configurable solutions for the high volume SoC market

The application of embedded run-time configurable architectures to System-on-chip design has long been considered a possible major enabling factor, especially in the direction of lowering time-to-market of new products as well as mitigating NRE costs related to verification, bug-fixes and product upgrades. In fact, while achieving significant success in specific application fields, reconfigurable computing has so far mostly failed to reach the high-volume application specific standard products (ASSP) that both in terms of volumes and revenues represent the largest share of today's SoC market. This is essentially due to the area overhead induced by these solutions with respect to standard ASIC design styles, which is unaffordable for the low margins that characterize this specific product class. In this paper, the exploitation of mask-programmable hardware technologies for deploying high volume ASSP is evaluated as a possible mitigation factor to the above discussed issues. The paper provides an introduction to mask-programmable technologies as well as an overview and a classification of most significant available trends and solutions in the field. In particular, the application of mask-level programmability in the context of the most significant trends in reconfigurable architectures is thoroughly discussed. In the authors' opinion it is both useful and necessary to capitalize on and exploit the valuable legacy created by 10 years of exploration of reconfigurable architectures in the context of the new possibilities offered by the emergence of mask-programmable options as a significant factor in SoC design.