SemiWiki: MCUs Are Now Embracing Mainstream NoCs

Key Takeaways

• To succeed in late-adopter markets, businesses may need to wait for the market to catch up while maintaining strong early adopter sales.
• MCUs are evolving beyond traditional roles, now incorporating AI, safety, and communication support, blurring the distinction between MCUs and SoCs.
• Power reduction and safety compliance are driving the adoption of NoCs in MCUs, necessitating advanced network designs to support complex requirements.

The moral of today's story is that to succeed in a late-adopter market, sometimes you just have to wait for the market to catch up (assuming you have a strong early adopter market to buy your product today). I have been working with Arteris for 6+ years now promoting their NoC technology, and there was never any question that they offer significant value for design teams building big, complex systems-on-chip connecting multiple IPs through extensive networks. Such systems include application processors and, more recently, AI systems for automotive applications. Lower-end designs, commonly MCUs, had been more resistant to the benefits of Arteris technology. But as AI, safety, and security are becoming just as important in MCUs as elsewhere, even MCU design teams are rethinking their earlier strategies.

Evolving MCU demands

Historically, MCUs have served relatively bounded objectives like control units in car engines and home appliances. The architecture was comparably simple: an 8-bit processor, memory, peripherals, timers, counters. One initiator, a few targets, easily satisfied by crossbar switch interconnect. Design support teams often built their own generators for this kind of interconnect. A small number even built their own NoC generators to handle more complex system interconnects.

Now even legacy in-house generators are coming under pressure, in part through competitive and regulatory requirements and in part to meet scalability expectations. AI is everywhere, as much in MCUs as anywhere else to support intelligent sensing. Automation demands for smart homes, cars, cities, factories, all require smart MCUs with communication support. Many must also prioritize safety and security, all at very constrained cost and power demand per unit. Cities and factories planning to deploy thousands of devices want unit prices around a few dollars at most and even lower maintenance costs.

MCUs are growing up to meet these needs; now it's not always easy to tell where MCUs end and SoCs begin. According to Andy Nightingale (VP Product Management and Marketing, Arteris), MCUs span a long tail beyond SoCs, from complex all the way down to simple devices. Simple MCUs still have their uses where cost is more important than adding features (simple toys or basic home thermostats, for example), but above wherever that breakpoint might be, more functions must be supported on-chip and that invariably requires NoC connectivity.

To read the full article on SemiWiki, click here.