Save Power And Area By Eliminating Redundant Resets


Resets initialize hardware by forcing it into a known state, either on design start up or to recover from an error. In today’s SoC designs, it is not uncommon to see designs with millions of registers that have resets. Unfortunately, many of these resets are redundant. Leaving these unnecessary register resets in the design leads to increased power consumption, excess area, and routing conges... » read more

Is Low Power Coverage Achievable?


Back in 2005, yes, before the invention of the iPhone, I made a slide to educate users on what to cover in Low Power Verification. Using a simple 3 island test case, I illustrated that verification had to be done in 4 states of operation, with 8 transitions and 16 sequences to be verified. This is after pruning the theoretically possible set of 8 states for on/off voltage islands. More than ... » read more

Power Management Heats Up


Power management has been talked about a lot recently, especially when it comes to mobile devices. But power is only a part of the issue—and perhaps not even the most important part. Heat is the ultimate limiter. If you cannot comfortably place the device on your face or wrist, then you will not have a successful product. Controlling heat, at the micro and macro levels, is an important asp... » read more

What Cognitive Computing Means For Chip Design


Cognitive computing. Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. All of these are concepts aim to make human types of problems computable, whether it be a self-driving car, a health care-providing robot, or a walking and talking assistant robot for the home or office. R&D teams around the world are working to create a whole new world of machines more intelligent than humans. Designing sys... » read more

Running Out Of Energy?


The anticipated and growing energy requirements for future computing needs will hit a wall in the next 24 years if the current trajectory is correct. At that point, the world will not produce enough energy for all of the devices that are expected to be drawing power. A report issued by the Semiconductor Industry Association and Semiconductor Research Corp., bases its conclusions on system-le... » read more

Verification Facing Unique Inflection Point


The Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) attracted more than 1,100 people to San Jose last week, just slightly less than last year. While a lot of focus, and most of the glory, goes to design within semiconductor companies, it is verification where most of the advancements are happening and thus the bigger focus for DVCon. The rate of change in verification and the producti... » read more

Power — Usage Shift Leads to Methodology Shift


Power exploration and accurate power calculation of SoCs in the target application environment is getting executive attention due to the fact that companies are missing market windows because of power issues. This makes system-level power analysis and management a key measurement. Verification solutions that provide accurate power analysis data early are critical to making design decisions that... » read more

Techno-Morality Is Our Concern


A decade or so ago, [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"] Chairman of the Board and co-CEO [getperson id="11034" comment="Aart de Geus"] gave a bunch of talks about the importance of Techonomics. Fundamentally this was about the merging of technology and business economics. De Geus saw that we were entering a period of connected everything, and that devices increasingly would be driven by in... » read more

Internet of FD-SOI Things?


Are fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) wafers having a moment? Certainly SOI wafers are not new. Soitec’s SmartCut layer transfer technology was patented in 1994, and wafers with implanted oxide layers were available before that. Still, adoption of SOI wafers has been limited. Though they offer improved device isolation and reduced parasitics, the increased wafer cost has been an ob... » read more

Power-Performance-Thermal


People like me are challenged in the culinary department. We believe that all we have to do is put the meat, vegetables, sauce and everything else in the recipe into the crockpot and a few hours later, out comes dinner. We (desperately) believe that we can dump the ingredients into a Ninja blender and get a healthy, tasty shake in a few minutes. (I have been politely informed that it is NOT the... » read more

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