Adoptability as a key success factor for media architectures

Summary form only given. Deep submicron technologies have allowed modern SOC's to be composed 100s of distinct IP blocks ranging from IO interfaces, to network-on-chip, to processing elements. These SOCs often take years from concept to production. Despite this huge silicon design cost, actual system design costs are dominated by software development often happing at multiple customers for each SOC. Adoptability as defined here is the ability for those software teams to first select a new SOC for their system and then to actually deploy the system software on it. To commit spending effort on a new platform, software teams must feel confidence that they can reuse existing investment or that any baseline software is provided for them. The software effort they do invest must be in areas that provide the end product significant differentiation to the customer from previous products. This presentation will talk about the various aspects of adoptability.