I never thought much of System-on-Chip (SoC) when it was first being discussed a few years ago. It seemed to me to be just another level of integration for hardware, just another way to make systems hard to debug by hiding the signals deeper in silicon. That opinion is changing, though, as I read articles like a recent one from EE Times on design abstraction for SoC systems.

At one level, this reminds me of the old joke about the MIT grad student who was assigned an application program to write by his professor. After a few weeks the prof asked how it was going. "Great!", came the reply. "I am almost done designing the language to write it in!".

It is certainly true that a lot of time can be spent reinventing the wheel with design options like this, but it also gives us a way to experiment with new ideas for design. As I have mentioned before, I think we need to break out of the current design box and find new ways to design systems rather than hardware or software.

Larry Mittag