Era of the ASSoC

Today, SoCs enable and underpin many applications, because a key factor in these applications is cost; by replacing several individual components with one device, the systems manufacturer will save on the BoM. Having fewer components also increases reliability and the mean-time between failure, alongside reducing test time and the number of defects due to PCB assembly issues.

Size and weight are also reduced by packaging components together to fit in a smaller space. Bringing functions together onto one die also leads to power and performance improvements. For vehicle manufacturers, SoCs improve control algorithms but also reduce cabling costs, as they use light, low-cost twisted-pair networks rather than the heavier cables needed to relay analogue signals.

A custom SoC provides added design security. Overbuilding becomes difficult as the contract manufacturer is able to use only the parts shipped to it by the customer, and counterfeiting is made significantly more expensive as it involves reverse-engineering the silicon. It is also possible to disguise the operation of key components, or to add product keys to each device to uniquely identify and lock it.

Advancing technologies are also making mature process nodes ideal for specialised applications. Gartner reports foundry wafer prices for a given process node decreased by an average of 10% per year over the past decade, making SoC products more attractive than combining individual components. Investment in these mature nodes has also allowed startups utilising the fabless business model to be more cost-effective, as they are able to leverage the power of customisation to deliver products that offer higher performance, lower power and lower cost to customers. Cost savings mean businesses are able to go to design houses such as S3 Group, create custom SoCs and still make a healthy profit.

ARM cores are at the heart of embedded processing. The ARM Cortex-M processor family has proven successful as the basis for a wide range of MCUs and SoCs because it was designed for power and area efficiency. The Cortex-M0+ offers significantly more performance with higher code density compared to the 8-bit architectures. The Cortex-M4 adds DSP instructions and support for floating-point arithmetic which greatly enhances the performance of sensor-driven designs. The EDA tools used to synthesise and lay out the circuits inside these SoCs are ARM-optimised and have improved dramatically in recent years, reducing the design complexity of such mixed signal devices. These techniques allow system-level optimisations for power, accuracy and performance that would be impossible using off-the-shelf parts.

The result is an environment where companies benefit from the experience of different teams to create highly differentiated, well-protected product lines that take full advantage of these highly accessible process nodes and sophisticated design tools. The custom SoC is now the smarter choice.