Three Common SoC Power Management Myths


SoCs are power-sensitive. Sometimes SoCs are sensitive because designers worry about the impact they have on the end product battery life. Sometimes designers worry about the effects of dissipating too much power on packaging and thermal issues. Sometimes designers are simply worried about the massive cooling budgets of data centers generating heat from thousands of their chips running in serve... » read more

Have Margins Outlived Their Usefulness?


To automate the process of solving complex design problems, the traditional approach has been to partition them into smaller, manageable tasks. For each task, we have built the best possible solution which we continuously refine over time. Additionally, we have managed the interdependencies between tasks by defining boundaries or margins; these often have been best- and worst-case values used t... » read more

Are Models Always The Answer?


Given the shift to system level design and the need to make tradeoffs early in the design process, much emphasis is placed on modeling, and for good reason. Tobias Bjerregaard, CEO of Teklatech reminded that power integrity analysis and signal integrity analysis evolved to be more or less a checkmark from many companies. “They run it and then say, ‘OK, it is fine,’ but they don't think... » read more

Power Integrity Optimization Cuts RF Substrate Noise


Our main focus is on dynamic voltage drop at 16-14-10nm and beyond, but the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) prompted me to share some silicon measurement results that are relevant to the RF design community. Normally, power integrity (PI) is looked at in the time domain, but in this work we looked at it from a frequency spectrum perspective. Silicon measurements prove how shaping the dynam... » read more

An Introduction To Reducing Dynamic Power


In the past few blogs we have been primarily talking about UPF and applying the Successive Refinement process to save power. But, this process addresses leakage power. In this session we want to talk about how to save dynamic power. As designs move to finFET technology, dynamic power is the dominant contributor to power consumption. Power consumption trend. I recently sat down with my c... » read more

Bluetooth Smart: Doing (A Lot) More With Less


By Charles Dittmer and Prithi Ramakrishnan I was really struck by Ann Steffora Mutschler's piece last month (Running Out Of Energy?). She notes that by 2040, the energy required for computing is expected to surpass the estimated world's energy production. That's a problem. One factor could be the rise of IoT applications. Billions of devices will be deployed in the next decade, and we ... » read more

Using Multi-Channel Connections for Optimized LPDDR4 Power & Performance


LPDDR4, the latest double data rate synchronous DRAM for mobile applications, includes a number of features that enable SoC design teams to reduce power consumption of discrete DRAM in mobile devices. Desktop devices like PCs and servers commonly utilize DDR devices mounted on dual inline memory modules (DIMM) hosted on 64-bit wide buses. This board-level solution allows field-upgradeable DRAM ... » read more

What’s Next for System-Level Power Modeling?


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

New Twist On Scalable Electronics?


Snug in their tents at Everest base camp a few years ago, Matt Du Puy and his colleagues marveled at the howling snowstorm outside, until they peeked out and saw snow drifts piling up quickly. They made a quick decision to tug on their boots and seek safer ground. As they did, clutches of other campers emerged and fell in line, bleary-eyed refugees trudging through the darkness. “We got of... » read more

Keeping NFCs Secure


Short-range communications, including near-field and semi-near-field communications such as Bluetooth, AirDrop, and Zigbee, have become as much a part of our daily lives as our mobile devices. Through some incredible engineering and standards efforts, they have achieved low-power communication over short distances with remarkable accuracy and consistency. But as even more devices begin tapping ... » read more

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