Facilitating Complex SoC Design Through Automation And Integration

By Andy Nightingale

May 6, 2026

The design demands of today’s highly advanced system-on-chip (SoC) devices have long outgrown the capabilities of manual workflows to manage them effectively. As these chips become more complex, only sophisticated, high-performance, and scalable automation can ensure that every component of the SoC functions seamlessly.

The SoC integration challenge

A fundamental aspect of SoC design is the integration of intellectual property (IP), typically delivered as reusable functional blocks. Many IPs, including central processing units, graphics processing units, and memory subsystems and controllers, are sourced from trusted third-party vendors. In addition, internally developed IP cores are also used. Customizing these IPs creates differentiation for the SoC relative to competing designs. An example is a neural processing unit, which is designed to perform artificial intelligence and machine learning tasks much faster than traditional processors and accelerators while consuming significantly less power.

At the system level, SoC integration is the process of gathering all IPs into a complete device. Today’s SoCs can contain hundreds to thousands of IPs, each with tens or hundreds of millions of transistors. Some IPs include internal subsystems, resulting in SoCs with billions of transistors. With this increase in complexity, integration challenges surface at the boundaries between hardware, software, and system connectivity.

At advanced nodes, the challenge is no longer just logical integration but physical and behavioral coordination. Wire delay increasingly dominates gate delay, and data movement, not compute, becomes the primary system bottleneck. At larger scales, data movement between IP blocks is typically handled by network-on-chip (NoC) interconnects, which must be designed and configured as part of the overall system.

To read the full article on Semiconductor Engineering, click here.

Explore NoC IP:

• Smart Network-on-Chip (NoC) IP
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