Alan Gibbons

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Alan Gibbons is a power architect at Synopsys, specializing in the development of advanced technology and methodology for the architecture and design of high-performance, energy-efficient SoCs with a focus on power architecture, system power management, power-performance-thermal trade-offs and software-to-silicon low-power methodology.

Author's Latest Posts

What’s Next for System-Level Power Modeling?

By Alan Gibbons - 23 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 1

Availability of models and libraries has long been one of the biggest barriers to the adoption of new EDA tools and methodologies, whether due to the investment needed to create these models and libraries or because of the “at-risk” nature of developing complex models in proprietary formats. With the approval of UPF3.0 (IEEE 1801-2015) this past December, we now have an industry standar... » read more

Stop Getting Burned By Power Consumption Surprises

By Alan Gibbons - 09 Nov, 2015 - Comments: 0

Very rarely these days do we get silicon back and find that we have missed our timing or test constraints by a significant margin. We have robust EDA tools, libraries and design methodologies in place to ensure that we can cleanly signoff against these constraints. However, we do continue to see too many unfortunate “surprises” in silicon related power (energy) consumption and thermal issue... » read more

Shift In Focus For Low Power Design

By Alan Gibbons - 10 Sep, 2015 - Comments: 0

The increased levels of interest we have seen over the last couple of years in system-level power modeling and energy-aware system-level design methodology, coupled with broad participation in the associated industry standard activities around system level power, gives us a clear indication that a shift in focus for low-power design is taking place. Our attempts to deliver energy-efficient high... » read more

Extending UPF For Use In System-Level Design

By Alan Gibbons - 12 Mar, 2015 - Comments: 0

Energy efficiency as a design constraint continues to dominate, and now that we see greater momentum behind a shift left toward system-level design, we are naturally seeing power-aware system-level design as a key area for EDA and IP enablement, especially among mobile and IoT platform providers. In my last article I highlighted the role that IP power models play in the architecture and design ... » read more

IP Power Models Enable Energy-Aware System-Level Design

By Alan Gibbons - 04 Dec, 2014 - Comments: 0

Energy efficiency is one of the primary design metrics for heterogeneous multi-core mobile platforms, and the very real threat of dark silicon reinforces the fact that we must manage energy consumption in these platforms intelligently. The way in which a platform is used absolutely determines how much energy it consumes, so we need to take a holistic approach to energy management. Furthermo... » read more