Where are we going? Product scaling in the system on chip era

In 1965 Gordon Moore observed that the level of integration that delivered the lowest cost per component was growing exponentially. Nearly 50 years later we're still following that observation. Increasing transistor counts, however, have qualitatively changed the products that are built on these technologies taking us from separate analog and digital chips to analog mixed signal systems containing billions of transistors. This can be seen in the differences between the original microprocessor, the Intel 4004 and the more recent Intel Nehalem-Ex processor. Today's Systems on Chip commonly contain a wide range of both digital and analog IP blocks. This integration of digital and an increasing amount of analog circuitry while maintaining market driven cost and power constraints has led to an ongoing set of challenges.