Summary
This chapter opened Part 2 of this book, which has a practical aspect to it since we will be putting the theoretical topics that were introduced in Part 1 to use. This chapter was purely architectural since we need to understand why certain choices that we implement in an SoC design are the way they are. We also need to be capable of making certain changes to the design microarchitecture while considering the overall aspect of the system we are designing and whether we have met the stated objectives. This chapter covered all the major steps involved in SoC architecture design. We started by covering the exploration phase, where the possible design options are studied and compared in terms of cost, implementation effort, and time. We proposed a comparative method by which the initial theoretical analysis can be conducted and how the thinking process of choosing a potential solution can be driven. Then, we moved on to the next stage of the architecture definition, which was very...