SoC or SoP? A balanced approach!

System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is being touted by the semiconductor industry as a means for incorporating all of the important electronic functions required for a product onto a single die. The rest of the system unit would consist of cheap pedestrian parts from other vendors. The beauty of this well hyped concept is that all the value-add and revenue would go to the semiconductor companies while other technology providers will be left with low margin scraps. In some cases, this assertion from the semiconductor companies will be correct. On the other hand, there will be cases where SoC will not be the best business case because of excessively complex process requirements and oversized low yielding chips. For these cases, partitioning the SoC functions and placing them onto small few-chip-modules (FCMs) can result in a lower system cost with no performance sacrifice. It is the goal of this paper to justify this premise.