System on Chip (SoC)

Imagine a kitchen where, instead of a separate stove, refrigerator, dishwasher and sink each taking up their own space and needing their own plumbing, every one of those appliances is somehow compressed into a single unit the size of a dinner plate, still fully functional. A System on Chip, or SoC, does something close to this for a computer, cramming almost every major function onto one piece of silicon instead of scattering them across multiple separate chips.

A traditional computer historically used separate chips for the processor, graphics, memory management and communications, each connected by wires on a circuit board. A SoC instead integrates most or all of these functions, a CPU for general computing, a GPU for graphics, a modem for connectivity, memory controllers and more, onto a single chip. This dramatically reduces the physical space, power consumption and cost needed to build a complete computing device.

This is exactly why SoCs power the device in almost every reader's pocket. A modern smartphone's entire computing brain, processing, graphics, camera image processing and cellular connectivity together, typically fits on one SoC, which is precisely what makes a phone thin, power-efficient and affordable to manufacture at the scale companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek operate at.

Building a SoC rarely means designing every single function from scratch. Most SoC designers license pre-built, pre-verified functional blocks, IP cores, for standard components like a processor architecture or a memory controller, and focus their own engineering effort on integrating those licensed blocks efficiently and adding whatever proprietary functionality actually differentiates their product.

Whenever a smartphone or electronics company boasts about a new chip's performance and efficiency in the same breath, a SoC design, integrating everything onto one piece of silicon rather than several, is almost always the underlying reason both improvements are possible simultaneously.