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Preface
With the rapid advances in technology, the conventional academic and research
departments of Electronics engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science,
Instrumentation Engineering over the globe are forced to come together and update
their curriculum with few common interdisciplinary courses in order to come out
with the engineers and researchers with muli-dimensional capabilities. The grow-
ing perception of the ‘Hardware becoming Soft’ and ‘Software becoming Hard’
with the emergence of the FPGAs has made its impact on both the hardware and
software professionals to change their mindset of working in narrow domains. An
interdisciplinary field where ‘Hardware meets the Software’ for undertaking seem-
ingly unfeasible tasks is System on Chip (SoC) which has become the basic plat-
form of modern electronic appliances. If it wasn’t for SoCs, we wouldn’t be driving
our car with foresight of the traffic congestion before hand using GPS. Without the
omnipresence of the SoCs in our every walks of life, the society is wouldn’t have
evidenced the rich benefits of the convergence of the technologies such as audio,
video, mobile, IPTV just to name a few. The growing expectations of the consumers
have placed the field of SoC design at the heart of at variance trends. On one hand
there are challenges owing to design complexities with the emergence of the new
processors, RTOS, software protocol stacks, buses, while the brutal forces of deep
submicron effects such as crosstalk, electromigration, timing closures are challeng-
ing the design metrics. Moreover the time to market pressure, process roadmap
acceleration, mixed design flows have posed various challenges to the SoC designer
community. The present book ‘Unleash the System On Chip using FPGAs and
Handel C’, attempts to address few challenging issues of SoC design leveraging the
FPGA platform with ‘C’ based programming methodology.
Organization of the book
The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of SoC.
It visualizes the unique place of the SoC in the microelectronics arena and covers
the market trends, challenges and opportunities for the budding professionals in this
