category: Power Awareness

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

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

Bridging The Gap
By Ann Mutschler - 01 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

We talk all the time about hardware/software co-design, co-verification, etc., but what is really interesting now is how vital the connection is between power awareness and system-level design. Yes, it sounds obvious, but so far this is an untapped market with ideas still being batted around. As discussed in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of my article series on energy and power, to achieve the best power... » read more

More EMI Mitigation
By Ann Mutschler - 03 Nov, 2011 - Comments: 0

With electromagnetic interference a major design challenge today in any product that sends or receives a signal, determining how to lessen the impact of this phenomenon was addressed to a large extent in my article, “EMI Cuts a Wide Swath,” but there are a few additional techniques that are important to highlight. Erick Olsen, marketing director at NXP explained that higher performance c... » read more

Are We There Yet?
By Ann Mutschler - 06 Oct, 2011 - Comments: 0

We’ve been talking in the industry for as long as I can remember about hardware and software co-design and I’m always curious to hear how that it progressing….or not. I posed this question to Jon McDonald, technical marketing engineer in Mentor Graphics’ design creation synthesis group who is constantly in touch with engineering teams. His take is that hardware and software teams are... » read more

Describing Power Intent
By Ann Mutschler - 08 Sep, 2011 - Comments: 0

Please don’t flame me. I am not aiming this at any one group in particular, but I am always struck at the slowness at which standards efforts move, especially when design teams are the ones really feeling the pain. Case in point: Savita Banerjee, SoC test and verification manager at LSI, told me recently that one of the most important challenges to be solved is a standard way to describe p... » read more

Don’t Forget Test
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Aug, 2011 - Comments: 0

In the modeling of designs for power, engineers make sure to include real system modes and get real activity vectors but, according to Pete Hardee at Cadence, there are a few things they are forgetting. “If the only activity you are using is your simulation test vectors, those are probably pretty unrealistic and that’s a big source of error. One other thing we see—and this is quite imp... » read more

Aren’t We Beyond That?
By Ann Mutschler - 21 Jul, 2011 - Comments: 0

The latest and greatest technologies always get the most attention because they are new and fresh, but gate-level simulation—a long-time workhorse tool—is seeing a small comeback with designers as of late. According to Cadence’s Pete Hardee, even though the industry is spending a lot of time looking ahead to architectural-level power modeling and virtual prototyping, the need for detai... » read more

Physical Effects Affecting Design
By Ann Mutschler - 16 Jun, 2011 - Comments: 0

With the increase in analog content in today’s designs, the industry is facing a real challenge in terms of how to perform mixed-signal verification at the functional level, at the SPICE level and down to physical implementation of the DRC rules. Joseph Davis, product manager for Calibre interactive and integration products at Mentor Graphics, explained there are three things driving what�... » read more

Wanted: ESL Power Design Flow
By Ann Mutschler - 14 Apr, 2011 - Comments: 0

In order to truly incorporate understanding of power at a higher-than-RTL level of abstraction, a new design flow is needed—and it won’t come from just one vendor. Apache believes that tool flow must contain ESL simulation, ESL synthesis to RTL along with RTL power analysis using ESL simulation results. The company maintains that this very approach has been demonstrated successfully by w... » read more

Design For Configurability
By Ann Mutschler - 17 Mar, 2011 - Comments: 0

I admit it was a bit of a surprise to me to hear from a leading IP provider of the missteps that still befall design teams today as they seek to reuse IP, but it’s a little like rubbernecking. How do you not look? According to Grant Martin, chief scientist at Tensilica, “The biggest thing that people still don’t think about at the beginning of designing some new function is designing i... » read more

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