System-on-Chip 101
or
"Everything you wanted to know about a computer but were afraid to ask"

This is Lecture 5 of my "SoC 101" course at Bar-Ilan University. In this course, I provide an overview of computer hardware engineering and SoC design, covering the full stack from the basic terminology, through computer architecture, and up to low-level software and design methodologies. The purpose of this course is to methodologically tell you about all those things that you may not have heard during your engineering studies and "fill the gaps" between the parts that you learned in-depth. It is in no way intended to provide a full, detailed description of every concept introduced, but following the course will give you a good idea about how a computer or any embedded system actually works.

Lecture 5 wraps up our discussion of a system-on-chip and its components, really putting it all together. The lecture takes a router as an example application and shows us how we can build a SoC for implementing a router. It starts with simple interfaces, such as GPIOs and UART and how to offload the CPU to allow it to take care of other tasks. We then add higher speed interfaces, such as Ethernet, and show how to handle these with different types of buses and accelerators. Finally, we deal with memory and the BootROM to complete our system.

This lecture is heavily based on Tzachi Noy's talk called "Why CPUs Suck!" that was given as part of the ADVLSI1 course at Bar-Ilan University in Spring 2019. Thank you Tzachi for this great lecture, which really helped me "put it all together"!

Lecture slides can be found on the EnICS Labs web site at:
https://enicslabs.com/academic-course...


All rights reserved:
Prof. Adam Teman
Emerging nanoscaled Integrated Circuits and Systems (EnICS) Labs
Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University