September 2010 - Page 2 of 2 - Semiconductor Engineering

Storm Before The Calm
By Ed Sperling - 17 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

The announcements out of ARM and Intel over the past couple week—and presumably from rivals AMD, MIPS and even Nvidia in coming weeks—are more than just a struggle for one-upmanship. The goal is much more far-reaching and the stakes are significantly higher than who has the fastest processor or core or even the lowest-power version. In the past year there has been a massive push to expan... » read more

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
By Barry Pangrle - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle I had the opportunity to attend the Hot Chips conference at Stanford in August and not surprisingly power was an important theme of many of the presentations. IBM had a presentation on adaptive energy management for their POWER7 chip, and Inphi presented on cloud computing without power penalties. Presenters from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of ... » read more

Challenges In Creating Power-Managed IP
By Bhanu Kapoor - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Bhanu Kapoor Creating low power IPs worked fairly well—at least until the process technology nodes for which leakage power wasn’t a big issue and clock gating was able to address dynamic power optimization. For 90nm and more advanced process technology nodes, leakage power became a dominant issue and the dynamic power needed better optimization. The use of voltage-based power management... » read more

The Power In Errors
By Ed Sperling - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By David Lammers Since 1956, some of the top minds in information processing, including Claude Shannon and John von Neumann, have been pondering the problem of how to build reliable systems out of unreliable components. The communications industry embraced the challenge, and deployed error correction techniques to ensure that today’s most sensitive information is transmitted reliably over no... » read more

A New Reference For Low-Power Processors
By Ed Sperling - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chattejee Just how much power can you squeeze out of a processor without destroying performance? Ask IBM. The company introduced a new methodology for power and energy management on its multicore processor chips. The new PowerPC chip, the Power 7, has eight main processor cores each with its own L2 and L3 cache and two central memory controllers. The architecture for the design is... » read more

What’s In The Package?
By Ed Sperling - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler The growing market for smart mobile devices and high-performance processors requiring more than 2GHz of processing power is driving IP providers to do even more work to prepare their IP offerings for customers. This theme was reflected at last week’s GlobalFoundries Global Technology Conference when the company’s senior VP of technology and R&D Gregg Bartle... » read more

Estimating Power From Mobile Device Apps
By Ann Mutschler - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler How do software application developers – even the ones sitting at home on their living room sofas with laptops – measure the power consumption of their application on the target device? This is a big problem today (something that is painfully obvious to owners of iPhones or Blackberries), and it will only get bigger. Software engineers may think it is not their... » read more

Changes In The Ecosystem
By Ed Sperling - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling For the better part of two decades, semiconductor companies have been talking about ecosystems mostly for marketing and economic reasons. They’re now talking thinking about ecosystems for complex technology reasons that involve integrated models for power, transactions and manufacturability. In the late 1990s, IBM began assembling its own loose ecosystem as a way of shieldi... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Trouble With Corners
By Ed Sperling - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss corners with PV Srinivas, senior director of engineering at Mentor Graphics; Dipesh Patel, vice president of engineering for physical IP at ARM; Lisa Minwell, director of technical marketing at Virage Logic; and Jim McCanny, CEO of Altos Design Automation. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPE: As we get to 22nm we’re... » read more

Burn, Baby, Burn
By Ann Mutschler - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

Obviously, software burns power on mobile devices, but exactly how? I found out recently, thanks to Pete Hardee, director of solutions marketing at Cadence Design Systems. Essentially, Hardee said, there are four ways that software burns power, following in order from most to least. First, depending on the mode, various peripherals are on and off and the big one for a smartphone is the LC... » read more

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