June 12, 2008 -- In today’s SOCs, reusing silicon IP (intellectual property) is absolutely necessary to meet schedules and maintain reasonable design complexity. But, although IP reuse is well-understood in the digital world and has even become common for some very-high-frequency blocks, such as SerDes (serializer-deserializer) functions for high-speed I/O and PLLs (phase-locked loops) in all sorts of applications, design reuse is virtually unknown for RF circuits in radio applications.
Why? And can you do anything about it? Or will the next generation of SOCs for mobile devices have to be largely custom chips?
By Ron Wilson, EDN Executive Editor
This brief introduction has been excerpted from the original copyrighted article.
View the entire article on the EDN Magazine website.
