Power Changes Everything


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Optimizing design methodologies for effective power utilization sometimes meaning throwing out old ideas and approaches and starting fresh. This is exactly what wireless chip giant Broadcom did in its quest to manage power in its chips. Low-Power Engineering spoke with Michael Hurlston, vice president of the mobile wireless group at Broadcom, to discuss current and f... » read more

Keeping Up With Complexity


By Ed Sperling There are two schools of thought in designing complex SoCs. One says that increasing complexity requires a higher level of abstraction. The other says providing enough detail to get the design right is the only effective way to do it. There are staunch proponents of both approaches, but what has been missing are bridges to tie the higher level of abstraction to the more labo... » read more

The Missing Pieces In Power Modeling—And Who’s Going To Provide Them


By Ed Sperling The push to develop power models is growing at each node, and at 22nm it will be virtually impossible to proceed without one or more models for power. Providing these kind of models is easier said than done, however. Creating an accurate power model requires accurate data from all the other pieces on a chip that potentially can affect the power. That includes how third-party ... » read more

Deep Dive: Energy Efficient Ethernet


By Pallab Chatterjee In late September, the IEEE ratified the 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) specification. The standard, and associated test certification specification, was supported by co-development of over 20 commercial products from multiple vendors, of which 13 were release to market simultaneous with the ratification. Wael Diab, from the office of the CTO at Broadcom, and ... » read more

The Long And Painful Path To Power Optimization


By Ed Sperling Think about any mobile Internet device today. Batteries typically last all day, applications shut down with ease, and the number of things it can do has reached the point where many people typically carry one device on the road rather than multiple devices they used to lug around several years ago. Perhaps even more astounding is the price drop on these devices. A basic cell ... » read more

New Forces For Consolidation


For the past five-plus decades, the overriding effect of Moore’s Law was to put more circuits on a single piece of silicon. While that’s still the case, the addition of multiple cores since 90nm also has meant more functions can be added to that chip, which creates a whole new business equation for makers of complex devices like smart phones. Instead of creating individual chips, a single... » read more

Low-Power Architectures Go Mainstream


By Pallab Chatterjee Until recently, low power engineering has been defined by the automated use of EDA tools in the design flow to help cut back on peak dynamic power. The new generation of mobile and video products has forced a change in that methodology. There are two other fast rising architectural approaches. The first is multicore, which is prevalent in new product introductions fr... » read more

Following The WLAN Alphabet To Lower Power


By Cheryl Ajluni The quest for low power in electronic devices is one that shows no sign of abating any time soon. Pressure for it comes from many different sources, such as the continual drive to pack more functionality into ever smaller, mobile electronic devices. To try and maintain a decent battery life for today’s power-hungry “road-warriors,” engineers have to reduce power con... » read more

The Other Side Of Consolidation


Consolidation has begun again in the electronics industry, but so far the majority of it is happening at the customer level.   While this is a sign that the economy has bottomed out and credit is beginning to flow—as unevenly as it always does when a downturn bottoms out—it’s creating a rather disturbing trend. Fewer customers mean fewer designs, even though the complexity of the des... » read more

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