communication [70] and a wide range of popular lifestyle
consumer electronics (such as, digital cameras, video
camcorders, digital televisions, and set-top boxes) [58].
According to In-Stat/MDR, the market for smart appliances
in digital home experienced a 70% compound annual growth
rate from 2001 to 2006 [38]. Moving forward, Gartner
Market Report predicted that $500 millions market for SoC
in 2005 will grow over 80% by 2010 [46]. The annual
growth rate is about 2x faster than general-purpose
microprocessors [28].
Such a change is largely due to the advances in device
technology, which enable us to put billions of transistors on a
chip for almost unlimited processing capability. Figure 1
shows that in the past 40 years, we have been able to put
about a million times more transistors onto a chip (keeping
pace with Moore’s Law [55] [56] [73]). The first
microprocessor had a couple of thousand transistors with
functionalities limited to basic logic/arithmetic processing. In
contrast, a modern SoC can have billions of transistors,
supporting a wide range of functions (processors/controllers,