Industry Expert Blogs

By Ed Sperling

System-Level Design sat down with Laurent Moll, chief technology officer at Arteris, to talk about interoperability, complexity and integration issues. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.

SLD: What’s the big challenge with IP?

Moll: Interoperability is always a concern. Because of ARM’s dominance, a lot of people are moving to AMBA protocols, whether that’s APB or AXI. The bigger companies typically have something they’ve developed internally, or an existing protocol they’re using. They tend to still have a sizeable legacy piece. They will move away from that eventually, but it will take time. Anytime the entire environment is built around that, it takes a while. The only other thing we have involving interoperability are port interfaces for memory controllers. There’s a lot of baggage around there. SLD: But there also are lots of little processors on an SoC, too. What impact does that have?

Moll: There are lots of things happening in a modern SoC. In mobile SoCs, there are subsystems for cameras, video and a lot of hardware acceleration. They started from the main CPUs from ARM and it trickled down to the subsystems, and that’s taking over a lot of the SoC. From a verification perspective and an assembly perspective, people don’t want to deal with too many things. So if one of them is dominant, you might as well use it as often as possible.

SLD: Where does the network on chip technology fit in?

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