Re: Will SoC completely replace generalized microcontrollers?

Telenochek wrote:

  I am wondering if the SoC (ARM/AMBA architecture)  (where a
whole system with upgradeable hardware modules/ IP cores can be stuffed
inside a single chip) will make all kinds of generalized
microcontrollers (like PIC) obsolete.


You're talking apples and oranges.

The PIC excels at simple jobs where the development
time is measured in days.  Hang some stuff on the
I/O's and write some quick code.  The parts cost
is measured in cents.

Moving IP cores around in an FPGA then converting
it to a custom design takes months and tens or
hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When PIC microcontrollers are used, they often need external hardware
to help them, DSP blocks cannot be integrated into the chip at will
(its all up to Microchip, whatever they decide to include in a chip).
    Just seems to me like SoC will eventually replace every MCU based
system, because of the processing power, and application-specific
flexibility in hardware. And almost all systems can use extra
processing power, capabilities & etc.


No.  Sometimes it's best to keep things as simple
as possible.  Sometimes a PIC is the right thing,
sometimes an ARM is the right thing and sometimes
an op-amp is the right thing.

I don't see that changing in the next 5 years.

    Maybe a traffic light with video camera and remote alerts for
speeders + array radar sensing of speeding cars & reporting their
position via GPS. I'm not saying that developing a supercomputing
traffic light is a very high priority task, just using it as an
illustration of stuffing more capability into into a simple system.

What would be the problem will be with replacing almost all MCU-based
systems with SoC?


Money, time, retraining.




.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: processors of the future: super-computer-on-a-chip?
    ... " How many cores do you think a chip could have, lets say 10 or 20+ years from now? ... relegating single-threaded performance to the back seat of its POWER architecture: instead, after pioneering dual-core products 5 years ago it has been steadily improving their single-threaded performance. ... Sure, there will be a few applications that could make really good use of huge numbers of slower cores, but will they fund the associated development sufficiently to overcome the resources available to develop commodity products? ... [end quote] ...
    (comp.arch)
  • Re: How to develop a random number generation device
    ... chip, and something new will be required to manage them. ... I think that the number of virtual cores will grow faster than the ... One CPU would be the manager, ... I'm happy to accept that doing things in hardware is often more reliable than doing things in software (I work with small embedded systems - I know when reliability is important, and I know about achieving it in practical systems). ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: How to develop a random number generation device
    ... chip, and something new will be required to manage them. ... I think that the number of virtual cores will grow faster than the ... One CPU would be the manager, ... embedded systems - I know when reliability is important, ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Target market for Intellasys.
    ... I was wrong about that Ambarella chip, it's average power requirements are more than I thought. ... With the 1 transistor dram, the substrate acts as a capacitor, so theoretically you get many times more memory density, good speed etc. ... I for one would be dropping in 10+DACS, extra processors, extra memory, and if available 36bit processor cores and full external SRAM memory buss mapped to one core. ... But such a scheme would allow customers to easily order a module populated with a desired amount of memory cores, and it would cost intellasys a lot less than putting memory on the processor. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: processors of the future: super-computer-on-a-chip?
    ... " How many cores do you think a chip could have, lets say 10 or 20+ years from now? ... Just because it's become harder to improve single-thread performance doesn't mean that it's no longer useful to and that taking the path of least hardware resistance is The Right Thing To Do. ... In fact, one could argue that because single-threaded operation characterizes such a large percentage of today's applications, and because software has historically changed so slowly compared with hardware, then there's relatively little reason to push multiple cores per chip beyond *at most* a few dozen for the immediate future while continuing to devote significant concentration to improving single-thread performance too. ...
    (comp.arch)