Power Modeling And Analysis


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power modeling and analysis with [getperson id="11489" p_name="Drew Wingard"], chief technology officer at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"]; [getperson id="11763" comment="Tobias Bjerregaard"], CEO for [getentity id="22908" e_name="Teklatech"]; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategy officer at [getentity id="22021" e_name="ANSYS"]; An... » read more

The Problem With Clocks


The synchronous digital design paradigm has enabled us to design circuits that are well controlled, but that is only true if the clocks themselves are well controlled. While overdesign techniques ensured that to be the case in early ASIC development, designs today cannot afford such luxuries. As we strive for lower power and higher operating frequencies, the clock has become a critical desig... » read more

Routing Signals At 7nm


[getperson id="11763" comment="Tobias Bjerregaard"], [getentity id="22908" e_name="Teklatech's"] CEO, discusses the challenges of designs at 7nm and beyond, including power integrity, how to reduce IR drop and timing issues, and how to improve the economics of scaling. SE: How much further can device scaling go? Bjerregaard: The way you should look at this is [getkc id="74" comment="Moore... » read more

Choosing Power-Saving Techniques


Engineers have come up with a long list of ways to save power in chip and system designs, but there are few rules to determine which approaches work best for any given design. There is widespread confusion about what techniques should be used where, which IP or subsystem is best, and how everything should be packaged together. The choices include everything from the proper level of clock and... » read more

Three Power-Saving Techniques Using PCI Express IP


The increasing data traffic between devices in a computing application environment is causing a large power footprint, and for that reason designers are looking for ways to lower the power consumption of their SoCs during sparse or idle times. The smaller, battery-powered devices are often idle and in deep sleep modes, but these deep power saving modes come at the cost of slow resume times to s... » 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

Micro-Architectural Exploration For Low Power Design


By Abhishek Ranjan, Saurabh Shrimal and Sanjiv Narayan In the first part of this series, we discussed the need to perform power optimizations and exploration at higher levels of abstractions, where the potential to reduce the power consumption was highest. While fine-grained local changes (like clock-gating, operand isolation, etc.) for power reduction are well understood and widely adopted,... » read more

A Strategy For Designing For Power With FinFETs


Recently Qualcomm announced their new SnapDragon processor 820, which was designed using finFET technology. They showed some amazing results, such as 2X improvement in performance and 2X improvement in power compared to 28nm designs. Previously, when ARM announced their A72 processors in finFET, they too had claimed 3.5X improvement in power compared to 28nm designs. But can designers expect... » read more

Power Breaks Everything


The emphasis on lowering power in everything from wearable electronics to data centers is turning into a perfect storm for the semiconductor ecosystem. Existing methodologies need to be fixed, techniques need to be improved, and expectations need to be adjusted. And even then the problems won't go away. In the past, most issues involving power—notably current leakage, physical effects such... » read more

Asynchronous Design: Is It Time Yet?


Non-mainstream technologies can offer advantages over more commonly used approaches, but usually at some additional cost (otherwise they’d probably be mainstream). The additional cost could be in design time, area, testability or whatever, and it might even be only a temporary disadvantage. If comparable time and energy were invested in the new technology, perhaps the additional costs would d... » read more

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