Barry Pangrle

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Barry Pangrle is a power architect. He is based in Silicon Valley.

Author's Latest Posts

Making Waves In Low-Power Design
By Barry Pangrle - 16 Jan, 2014 - Comments: 0

Barry Pangrle In a blog last April we looked at a potential candidate technology that just might be able to produce an economically feasible method for implementing delay insensitive circuits in CMOS. The basic idea behind this technology has been around since at least the 1990s and is better known as Null Convention Logic™ (NCL). Much of the work in this area was pioneered by Karl Fant and ... » read more

Fastest Computers On The Planet
By Barry Pangrle - 05 Dec, 2013 - Comments: 0

The latest Green500 list (Excel spreadsheet here) was just released at the end of last month and heterogeneous systems now own the top of the list. The Top 10 systems all use a combination of Intel Xeon (mostly E5) processors paired with NVIDIA K20s. There are now 6 systems listed that have broken the 3,000 MFLOPS/W barrier and TSUBAME-KFC, belonging to the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s GSI... » read more

ARM Cortex-A53, UPF & FD-SOI
By Barry Pangrle - 07 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 0

The IEEE Standards Association Symposium on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Interoperability was held on Oct. 24. I found the first session, Interoperability Challenges: Power Management in Silicon, with presentations by Erich Marschner of Mentor Graphics and Stuart Riches and Adnan Khan (both from ARM) to be particularly interesting. Earlier this year, the IEEE announced a new version of UP... » read more

Thermals And New Technology Nodes
By Barry Pangrle - 10 Oct, 2013 - Comments: 1

I recently had a friend in EDA ask me about how important thermal analysis is going to be with new FinFET technologies.  I told him that I honestly haven't had too much direct experience with 16nm FinFET yet, but in general, I'd expect thermal analysis to be somewhat more important as feature sizes shrink regardless of whether it's FinFET or planar. Part of my reasoning behind this is that sma... » read more

HotChips: Power8
By Barry Pangrle - 12 Sep, 2013 - Comments: 2

It’s another year, another HotChips Conference and another update on IBM’s POWER processor. IBM continues to impress with its big iron processor, and this year it’s the new POWER8. IBM announced more details of its new POWER8 processor at HotChips and IBM now joins Intel at 22nm, but with the twist that IBM’s process is based on SOI technology. The POWER8 quadruples the thread count ... » read more

Material Impact
By Barry Pangrle - 08 Aug, 2013 - Comments: 0

Ed Sperling’s June article New Approaches to Better Performance and Lower Power took a look at the new materials that researchers are examining for future technology nodes. Figure 1. Basic Planar CMOS FET Figure 1 shows a basic diagram of a planar CMOS FET (diagrams for other FETs can be found here). The drive strength of a FET is proportional to , where μ is the surface mobility for... » read more

The Green500 And The Charge Towards Exascale Computing
By Barry Pangrle - 11 Jul, 2013 - Comments: 0

The latest Green500 list (Excel spreadsheet here) was just released at the end of June, and heterogeneous systems continue to dominate the top of the list with the new leader besting the old by nearly 30%. Two systems using Intel Xeon E5-2687W 8-Core 3.1 GHz processors coupled with NVIDIA K20’s topped the list. Eurotech’s Eurora and Aurora Tigon both broke the 3,000 MFLOPS/W barrier, record... » read more

New Standard!
By Barry Pangrle - 13 Jun, 2013 - Comments: 0

It’s been a little over four years since the first IEEE 1801 standard was officially published in March 2009, but the standard can trace its roots back to years before that date. On May 30th, the IEEE released a press announcement for the newest version of the standard, IEEE 1801-2013 (a.k.a. UPF 2.1). It takes a considerable amount of effort and attention to detail to produce a solid standar... » read more

Power Markets
By Barry Pangrle - 09 May, 2013 - Comments: 0

There has been an ongoing discussion in the industry about the importance of power and performance and which is more important. I submit that the real question is: How much performance can be squeezed out of the power budget for any given market segment? Figure 1. Processor Market Segment Power Budgets Figure 1 shows a rough breakdown of the different market segments for processors, alo... » read more

The Power Of Logic
By Barry Pangrle - 11 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 1

By Barry Pangrle CMOS logic has been dominant since nMOS gave way back in the 1980s. Dynamic logic, like domino, has seen its application in high-speed and often hand-crafted datapath circuits. The potential energy efficiency of operating at near-threshold voltage is very enticing but having to deal with variability issues has made engineers reluctant to try to do more at lower voltages. The q... » read more

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