5. Recent trends and developments

5.1 Evolution towards single-chip multiprocessor circuit design

The complexity of applications in the multimedia, mobile telephony or gaming sectors is such that the systems that perform these functions are made up of several processors (or nodes or computing cores) associated with existing components interconnected by a high-performance communications network (figure 16 ). To this must be added memory space to store a very large volume of data, since in some applications half of the system's surface area is taken up by memory. As all these systems correspond to mass markets, they are all (or will be) integrated on a single chip (SoC for System on Chip or single-chip...