category: Power Architect

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Power vs. Accuracy
By Barry Pangrle - 10 Feb, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle So, how much energy are you willing to expend to be accurate? The question is one that chip designers face more often than they probably realize. The first question really is, ‘How accurate do you need to be?’ Whether it is test coverage, verification coverage, signal-to-noise ratio, or error-correcting codes, the list is seemingly endless. Variability in the environmen... » read more

Power Next
By Barry Pangrle - 13 Jan, 2011 - Comments: 0

Development teams are faced with many tradeoffs when defining a new product: How much should it cost? What functionality or features need to be included? And what level of performance is required? As an example, in order to reduce costs it’s possible to trade away performance by implementing functionality in software instead of in application-specific hardware. For an SoC that already inc... » read more

Power On
By Barry Pangrle - 02 Dec, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle Process development is more challenging at each successive technology node but the march forward, for the time being, continues unabated. Voltage scaling stopped around the 100nm node at roughly 1.0v as threshold voltages stopped shrinking in an attempt to keep leakage in check. It’s been the progression to the newer and smaller technology nodes that has really pushed power ... » read more

Power To Fly
By Barry Pangrle - 04 Nov, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle As technologies mature, they often follow similar profiles. Back on Oct. 14th I heard Lesley Curwen of the BBC interviewing Charles Champion, executive vice president of engineering at Airbus. Champion said that over the last 40 years the airline industry has reduced emissions and fuel burn by 70%. He pointed out that the industry initially focused on speed and the tendency no... » read more

The Good Kind Of Bias
By Barry Pangrle - 07 Oct, 2010 - Comments: 1

By Barry Pangrle Back gating, body bias, substrate bias, and back bias all refer to a technique for dynamically adjusting the threshold voltage of a CMOS transistor. CMOS transistors are often thought of as three-terminal devices with terminals for the source, gate and drain. It’s quite common, though, to have a fourth terminal available connected to the substrate (or body). Most engineer... » 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

Power Conference
By Barry Pangrle - 12 Aug, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle Big 10, ACC, SEC, Big 12, Pac 10? Well, if you’re thinking of universities that’s a start in the right direction (and there will be a quiz at the end of this blog). If you reside outside of the U.S., I apologize for the local reference. When organizing any technical conference, there’s always a challenge in striking a balance between presenting research that may have... » read more

The Power Of Standards
By Barry Pangrle - 08 Jul, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle It’s often said that the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. As an industry, EDA seems to have a short memory as VMM and OVM (now becoming UVM), VHDL and Verilog, and more recently UPF and CPF. In cases where one standard suffices, it is horribly inefficient to create multiple “standards.” It is a waste of effort and resources for ED... » read more

The Power Of The Customer Experience
By Barry Pangrle - 10 Jun, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle Consumers of electronics don’t buy chips, they buy products or gadgets. Sure the geeks among us may know about “the chip” in a PC, typically in reference to the CPU or maybe even the GPU. But there are many chips in the product and you’d have to be an über-geek to know all of them. How many customers actually know the primary SoC in their smart phone? The point is ... » read more

It’s The Architecture
By Barry Pangrle - 13 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

Power optimization is a system issue. How many times have you experienced your cell phone provider sending your phone an update and the battery lifetime then improving? The hardware team built in the hooks but there just wasn't enough time to get the software together and tested before the product needed to ship, so the improved functionality shipped later. Well, that's at least one advanta... » read more

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