ABSTRACT
The move to SoC began sometime in the mid-1990s. At this point, the leading CMOS-based semiconductor process technologies of 0.35 and 0.25µm were sufficiently capable of allowing the integration of many of the major components of a second-generation wireless handset or a digital set-top box onto a
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single chip. The digital baseband functions of a cell phone — a Digital Signal Processor (DSP), hardware (HW) support for voice encoding and decoding, and a RISC processor — could all be placed onto a single die. Although such a baseband SoC was far from the complete cell phone electronics — there were major components such as the RF transceiver, the analog power control, analog baseband, and passives that were not integrated — the evolutionary path with each new process generation, to integrate more and more onto a single die, was clear. Today’s chipset would become tomorrow’s chip. The problems of integrating hybrid technologies involved in making up a complete electronic system would be solved. Thus, eventually, SoC could encompass design components drawn from the standard and more adventurous domains of digital, analog, RF, reconfigurable logic, sensors, actuators, optical, chemical, microelectronic mechanical systems, and even biological and nanotechnology.
