Trend and challenge on system-on-chip, technology for multimedia system design [Keynote/Plenary presentations]

In the past half century, the IC industry has continuously enjoyed enormous success due to its ever increasing large-scale integration. Traditionally, VLSI circuitry design is to achieve optimal energy consumption, power dissipation, chip sizes, interconnection efficiency, etc by optimization on floor planning, placement/routing, etc. With the advent of System-on-Chip (SoC) technology, the very definition of “integration optimization” deserves a revisit to incorporate newly introduced dimensions. SoC is governed by the trends that (1) more and more complex system design demanded by new applications and (2) greater and greater integration prophesied by the Moore’s Law. Consequently, integration means not only that most components will be spatially integrated on a single chip, cross-abstraction layer design is also of vital importance. This requires tighter interaction between algorithm (software) design and hardware design. For hardware/software co-design of SoC, it requires a cross-disciplinary knowledge in order to vertically integrate hardware, software, algorithms, applications, and their interfaces.