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A growing number of advanced system-on-chip (SoC) designs are being deployed not only by the traditional merchant IC design companies but also by a more non-traditional set of companies: cloud providers, automakers, and consumer-goods manufacturers. These designs are highly advanced, targeting leading-edge manufacturing nodes, and they contain an ever-increasing software component. They’re also huge, with high gate counts, and rely on complex on-chip networks, SRAM, power, clock, and test architectures.

One of the key differences lies in the purpose of the chips developed by these systems companies. Such chips are often less general-purpose and more application-specific, with engineers designing them to suit the needs of specific hardware and software system environments.