How many people does it take to design an SoC? - Redux. Building brains with processors.

By _EDA360 Insider

March 29, 2011

Earlier this month, I wrote a blog entry about the number of people it takes to design an SoC. Since then, I’ve attended DATE in Grenoble and Steve Furber’s keynote address titled “Biologically-inspired massively-parallel architectures—computing beyond a million processors” contained a brief discussion of this topic. If you aren’t familiar with Furber, he’s the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at the School of Computer Science, Manchester University, UK and his CV sports a long list of impressive achievements. More important for this discussion, perhaps: Furber was the principal designer of the first ARM processor for Acorn Computers back in the 1980s and he’s been exploring many of the interesting things you can do with a simplified 32-bit RISC processor ever since. Furber’s DATE keynote provided an update on one of those interesting things.