| This project started as an interim report. The purpose was to communicate to various groups within Advantest about the main issues for system-on-achip (SoC) design and testing and the common industrial practices. Over one years time, a number of people contributed in various capacities to complete this report.
During this period, I also participated in the Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) Alliances effort to develop various specification documents related to SoC design and testing and in the IEEE P1500 working groups effort to develop a standard for core testing. As a result of this participation, I noticed that SoC information is widely scattered and many misconceptions are spread throughout the community, from misnamed terms to complete conceptual misunderstanding. It was obvious that our interim report would be quite useful for the community as a general publication.
With that thought, I contacted Artech House. The editorial staff at Artech House had already been hearing and reading a lot about system-ona- chip and was very excited about this project. Considering the rapid technology changes, a four-month schedule was prepared and I set out to prepare the manuscript before the end of 1999. Although I had the baseline material in the form of an interim report, simple editing was not enough. Besides the removal of some sections from the report, many sections and even chapters required a complete overhaul and new write-ups. Similarly, a couple of new chapters were needed. Because of the very aggressive schedule and other internal projects, at times it felt very tedious and tiring. This may have resulted in incomplete discussions in a few sections. I was able to fix descriptions in some sections based on feedback from my colleagues at ARD and from Artech reviewers, but readers may find a few more holes in the text. |