SuperHyway provides SoC backbone
Author: Andy Jones, John Carey and Greville Commins

Recent technology improvements have made it cost-effective to integrate components previously connected on a PCB onto a single piece of silicon. These so-called system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices generally comprise most of the blocks commonly found on a computer motherboard plus some application-specific intellectual property (IP). This means design issues that were formerly the province of systems designers are now within the realm of the chip architect. As a result, interconnection schemes common at the system and network level, such as packet switching, must now be considered at the SoC level.