Hyun-Kyu Yu received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electronics engineering from Kyungpook Nat’l University in 1981 and 1983 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from KAIST in 1994. He joined the ETRI in 1983, and is presently senior vice president with the responsibility for SW-SoC convergence technology. Dr. Yu is a board member of IEEK, vice president of IEMEK, and a senior member of IEEE. He founded and has been serving as chairman of the RF Integrated Circuit Technology Society in Korea since 2000. He has received several awards including Nat’l award from government for the contribution to the research on RF CMOS technologies. More recently, he has been working on Digital RF transceiver SoC for 3G LTE and CMOS based 77GHz Multi-functional radar system. Since 2012, he served the Embedded SW and SoC industry associations as the chairman of Embedded SW Technology Forum and Vice Chair of System-Semiconductor Forum of Korea. He is the author and co-author of over 120 technical papers and 100 patents in the devices, circuits, and system design areas.

Abstract

Rapid industry reform from desktop era to mobile computing has led to the widespread adoption of application processors throughout the IT industry. While the application processor market has become mainstream in recent years, it is still struggling for more performance while maintaining portability in several areas such as computer vision and mixed-reality. The semiconductor industry looks to satisfy these market requirements with many-core hand-top supercomputing. The emergence of many-core computing as the next step in the progression of the industry presents several design challenges for system architects: reasonable power consumption, software programming, core reliability, and core utilization for scalable performance. We review current developments of application processor SoCs and give a forecast for future many-core the SW-SoC platform.