Abstract
In the nanometer era, the increase in nonrecurring engineering costs is a challenge for SoCs that can be faced through a standardization process. Hardware specialization of a standard platform to a given application can be achieved by exploiting recon- figurable technology. This paper presents a XiSystem SoC, which integrates two different field-programmable devices to provide ap- plication-specific computing blocks and IOs. A XiRisc reconfig- urable processor is exploited to achieve more than one order of magnitude speed-up and energy consumption reduction vis-à-vis a DSP-like processor, while an eFPGA is integrated in the system in order to make it flexible enough to support various IO ports and protocols. The reconfigurable IO device is also utilized for pre/post data processing and implementation of some standard computa- tional blocks.