CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

7 June 2004

Company News

Prentice Hall Publishes New Book by Tensilica CEO Chris Rowen

In a new book titled, "Engineering the Complex SOC: Fast, Flexible Design with Configurable Processors," author Chris Rowen, CEO of Tensilica®, Inc. ( http://www.tensilica.com ), and editor Steve Leibson, Tensilica's Technology Evangelist, describe an emerging system-on-chip (SOC) design methodology that allows chip designers to finish larger projects in much less time, with higher quality results. This book is part of the Modern Semiconductor Design Series and is available through Prentice Hall PTR (Professional Technical Reference) on the Internet at http://www.phptr.com/title/0131455370 . The book has a list price of $89.00.

This book targets two groups of readers: senior managers wishing to understand and control the strategic and economic challenges of SOC design investment; and senior architects, engineers, and embedded software developers working to exploit the potential of faster, more creative and more reliable SOC design.

Engineering the Complex SOC outlines the major forces changing the semiconductor design process and introduces the concept of using configurable, extensible processors as basic building blocks, rather than using complex and costly hand-coded RTL. It lays out a systematic, proven SOC design methodology. It introduces the key concepts and techniques of processor configuration, extension, hardware/software co-generation and multiple processor partitioning and communication. The book uses real-world illustrations extensively, both in the form of case studies about architecture decisions and in short examples that communicate the flavor and the power of these methods.

"The goal of this book was to clearly document an efficient new way to design integrated circuits - one that is already being broadly adopted by the industry and radically changing the way companies approach chip design," stated Rowen. "The book helps designers learn an alternative design approach to the risky, tedious and time-consuming process of describing hardware using error-prone design languages like Verilog and VHDL - until now, the predominant method for designing custom semiconductors. It's much easier, faster and more reliable to use processors that can simply be configured and programmed for virtually any task."

The book includes forewords from Dr. Clayton Christenson, professor at the Harvard Business School and leading author on "disruptive technology", and Dr. John Hennessy, President of Stanford University and renowned microprocessor expert.

 

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