Trends in complex SoC design: From technology variability to multiprocessor architectures

Emerging 3D stacking techniques combined with the scaling of CMOS technologies give to the SoC architects the possibility of designing very complex multi-application systems. New parallel architectures are proposed to bring flexibility and facilitate the management of the complexity, but the new challenge that the architects have to address, concurrently with the power saving policies, is the technology variability which becomes more and more important in advanced technologies. At system level, the architecture has to take this limitation into account, to reach the better performance the technology could provide.