The semiconductor market has always been fast growing and rapidly changing. Continually shrinking feature sizes and regular technological breakthroughs have helped drive this boom and if anything, the rate of change is increasing. To remain competitive in such a fast moving market, semiconductor manufacturers have had to change the way they work.Advances in manufacturing technology allow more and more functions to be built onto a single IC. This allows manufacturers to move from building dedicated devices to the development of highly-integrated, programmable ICs able to perform a wide variety of functions and flexible enough to meet rapidly changing market demands. While this approach allowed new systems to be developed more quickly and cost-effectively, it changed the balance between hardware and software, with software now equally as important as hardware in today's systems.To meet the demands of next generation systems, platform approaches such as Philips Semiconductors' Silicon System Platform architecture provide a generic architecture for designing new systems using a library of tried and tested hardware and software blocks. This changes the system designers' focus from the design of individual system functions to the design of complete system solutions using existing hardware and software functional blocks. Resulting in reduced design times and cost, this new approach enables complete new systems to be brought quickly to the market at the right time and the right cost, now and in the future.