SemiWiki: Managing Service Level Risk in SoC Design

Bernard Murphy authored this SemiWiki article on Service Level Risk in SoC Design.

June 21st, 2023 – by Bernard Murphy

Discussion on design metrics tends to revolve around power, performance, safety, and security. All of these are important, but there is an additional performance objective a product must meet defined by a minimum service level agreement (SLA). A printer display may work fine most of the time yet will intermittently corrupt the display. Or the nav system in your car intermittently fails to signal an upcoming turn until after you pass the turn. These are traffic (data) related problems. Conventional performance metrics only ensure that the system will perform as expected under ideal conditions; SLA metrics set a minimum performance expectation within specified traffic bounds. OEMs ultimately care about SLAs, not STAs. Meeting/defining an SLA is governed by interconnect design and operation.

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