SoC design with HW/SW co-design methodology for wireless communication system

The rapid evolution and the popularity of wireless devices among worldwide users has made wireless communication as one of the main market of system-on-chip (SoC) development. The complexity of the design, the number of supported application, time-to-market, design technology are some critical challenges that need to be taken into consideration when designing the SoC for wireless communication. This paper reviews the design requirement of wireless communication system and the current SoC design technology. Finally, this paper proposes the improved HW/SW design methodology that can tackle the critical challenges for wireless communication system design. As an example of the implementation of the proposed methodology, the design and verification results of our proposed IEEE 802.11n WLAN system SoC are presented.