Technological progress in designing and manufacturing integrated circuits allows the integration of complex microelectronic systems including processors, memory, application specific and analog circuits on a single chip. This trend will dominate future system design. On the one hand, the system designer can make use of predesigned and prevalidated modules (embedded cores) for standard components such as processors, memory elements, bus interfaces (PCI, ISA, ...). On the other hand the complexity of the complete "system-on-a-chip" imposes various new challenges.

In the lecture the following issues will be addressed:

• selection of an appropriate manufacturing process
• selection of embedded cores
• design of application specific logic
• integration of components
• design and integration of analog and mixed-signal parts
• testing of the chip
• simultaneous development of software