January 2012 - Page 4 of 4 - Semiconductor Engineering

Better Power Planning
By Preeti Gupta - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Preeti Gupta Making the right architectural decisions for controlling power consumption and ensuring power integrity requires early identification and quantification of varying current demands in a semiconductor design. Furthermore, low-power designs pose complexities for power verification, such as significant current surges caused by clock gating or power gating transitions. In last mo... » read more

Power Intent Formats: Reality Check
By Luke Lang - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 2

By Luke Lang It is January once again. In addition to wishing everyone a Happy New Year, I would like to wish everyone a lower-power 2012. This month, I will continue with the CPF/UPF power format discussion and examine more complex power architectures. Also, the focus will be only on CPF 1.1 and UPF 1.0. These are what the current tools support. IEEE 1801 is up and coming, but there is n... » read more

Undervolting & Underclocking
By Barry Pangrle - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle Last month we looked at record-breaking clock frequencies accompanied by voltage levels over 2V for some high-speed x86 processors. This month we’re going to go in the opposite direction—reducing the voltage and clock frequency to reduce power. Our processor of choice is the AMD A8-3850, a 100W, 2.9 GHz, quad-core, x86 processor that also incorporates 400 “Radeon core... » read more

Experts At The Table: Making Software More Energy-Efficient
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss software and power with Adam Kaiser, Nucleus RTOS architect at Mentor Graphics; Pete Hardee, marketing director at Cadence; Chris Rowen, CTO of Tensilica; Vic Kulkarni, senior vice president and general manager of Apache Design, and Bill Neifert, CTO of Carbon Design Systems. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPE: Softw... » read more

Peace Overture
By Ann Mutschler - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

One look at the headline and you may think I’m going to suggest that virtual prototyping can solve the myriad issues between hardware and software teams but rest assured, I’m not. I will tell you that I’ve heard some promising anecdotes lately, and that is a little bit encouraging. When you finish reading, please chime in with your comments! In the course of interviewing Achim Nohl, te... » read more

Making Software Better
By Ed Sperling - 11 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

Low-Power Engineering talks about what will make software more energy-efficient with Pete Hardee, marketing director at Cadence; Adam Kaiser, Nucleus RTOS architect at Mentor Graphics; Chris Rowen, CTO of Tensilica; Vic Kulkarni, senior VP and General Manager of Apache Design, and Bill Neifert, CTO of Carbon Design. [youtube vid=Jxquj8K8_BA] » read more

Verifying The Pieces
By Ed Sperling - 06 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

It’s not uncommon to hear engineers express disbelief these days that a complex device actually works. This is both a sign of amazing advancement in system-level design, as well as a scary revelation that’s surfacing from all parts of the design world. What’s behind this uncertainty is the growing complexity of devices, which has moved design well beyond the comprehension of a single e... » read more

Beyond Power, Performance And Area
By Ed Sperling - 06 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

For the past five decades, the tradeoffs in IC design have always been between power, performance and area. Performance dominated for most of the history of IC development—remember the MIPS and MHz/GHz wars—followed closely by area because of the need to cut costs. Over the past few years, power has moved from an afterthought to the front of the pack because of the emphasis on mobility ... » read more

Tennant’s Law
By Chris Mack - 05 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 1

It’s hard to make things small.  It’s even harder to make things small cheaply. I was recently re-reading Tim Brunner’s wonderful paper from 2003, “Why optical lithography will live forever” [1] when I was reminded of Tennant’s Law [2,3].  Don Tennant spent 27 years working in lithography-related fields at Bell Labs, and has been running the Cornell NanoScale Science and Techno... » read more

Different wavelengths from one material – a new freedom in LED design
By Michael Watts - 03 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Michael P.C. Watts When light is emitted from a particle that contains a few hundred atoms, the wavelength of the light is affected by the size of the region – this is a very interesting quantum effect that provides a way of tuning wavelengths of Light Emitting Diodes (LED) independent of the band-gap of the material. In particular, there is a possibility of creating a white LED or a gr... » read more

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