System on Chip, or System on Chips: The Many Paths to Integration

By Ron Wilson, Altera

System on chip means putting everything you can on one die. Only lack of technology, major process incompatibility, or physically running out of real estate have seemed valid excuses for taking a multi-die approach to integration. But these ideas are ending.

Today new options, including lower-cost multi-die packaging, novel uses of high-speed serial transceivers, and even non-electrical interconnect are opening new possibilities for partitioning system cores across multiple dice. Architects can contemplate ideas that bandwidth limitations or power budgets would have precluded before. This means new combinations of performance, efficiency, and compactness well beyond today’s state of the market.

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