Modern System-On-Chip Design

3 units

The System-on-Chip (SoC) technology is at the core of most electronic systems: smartphones, wearable devices, autonomous robots and cars, and aerospace and medical electronics. In these SoCs, billions of transistors can be integrated on a single silicon chip containing various components, such as microprocessors, DSPs, hardware accelerators, memories, and I/O interfaces. Topics include SoC architectures, design tools, and methods as well as system-level trade-offs between performance, power consumption, energy efficiency, reliability, and programmability. Students will gain an insight into the early stages of the SoC design process by performing the tasks of developing functional specifications, applying partitions and map functions to hardware and/or software, and then evaluating and validating system performance. Assignments include hands-on design projects. This course is open to both graduate and senior undergraduate students.