The Many Flavors Of UPF: Which Is Right For Your Design?


Energy efficient electronic systems require sophisticated power management architectures that present difficult low-power verification challenges. Accellera introduced the Unified Power Format (UPF) standard in 2007 to help engineers deal with these complex issues. To keep pace with the growing complexity of low-power designs, the UPF standard has itself continued to evolve through the relea... » read more

Usage Models Driving Data Center Architecture Changes


Data center architectures are undergoing a significant change, fueled by more data and much greater usage from remote locations. Part of this shift involves the need to move some processing closer to the various memory hierarchies, from SRAM to DRAM to storage. There is more data to process, and it takes less energy and time to process that data in place. But workloads also are being distrib... » read more

Know Your Own Power, Early And Accurately


By Taruna Reddy and Vin Liao Chip designers have always had to balance timing and area. Everyone wants a design as fast as possible and as compact as possible, but these two goals are usually in conflict. For the last couple of decades, minimal power consumption has been a third goal, often of equal importance. Some of the biggest drivers for the semiconductor industry are battery operated p... » read more

Fast, Low-Power Inferencing


Power and performance are often thought of as opposing goals, opposite sides of the same coin if you will. A system can be run really fast, but it will burn a lot of power. Ease up on the accelerator and power consumption goes down, but so does performance. Optimizing for both power and performance is challenging. Inferencing algorithms for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are compute int... » read more

Low Power Still Leads, But Energy Emerges As Future Focus


In 2021 and beyond, chips used in smartphones, digital appliances, and nearly all major applications will need to go on a diet. As the amount of data being generated continues to swell, more processors are being added everywhere to sift through that data to determine what's useful, what isn't, and how to distribute it. All of that uses power, and not all of it is being done as efficiently as... » read more

Detecting Electrical Hazards Incurred By Inter-Voltage Domain Crossing In Custom SRAMs


Fast-growing markets, such as 5G, biotechnology, AI, and automotive, are driving a new wave of low-power semiconductor design requirements and, hence, more aggressive low-power management techniques are needed. Consequently, even large macros within a chip, such as SRAMs, now feature multiple voltage domains to limit power draw during light-sleep, deep-sleep, and shutdown-low-power modes. These... » read more

Customizing Low-Power Platforms Using UPF Dynamic Properties


Low power design and verification engineers need a way to continuously probe various dynamic properties of UPF objects in order to monitor the current state of a verification strategy and utilize that information to develop custom low-power verification environments. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a reliable, formalized way to do this. Since availability of the dynamic properties of unif... » read more

Arm Goes For Performance


At the recent Linley Processor Conference, Arm presented two processors. This was regarded as so confidential that the original pre-conference version of the presentations didn't contain the Arm one, even though that pdf was only put online about an hour before. But most of the outline of what they presented they already talked about in May, a few months ago. I said recently that this seem... » read more

Deploying Accurate Always-On Face Unlock


Accurate face verification has long been considered a challenge due to the number of variables, ranging from lighting to pose and facial expression. This white paper looks at a new approach — combining classic and modern machine learning (deep learning) techniques — that achieves 98.36% accuracy, running efficiently on Arm ML-optimized platforms, and addressing key security issues such a... » read more

Unleashing The World’s Technology Potential


A year ago, as I prepared for my opening keynote at Arm TechCon, our biggest annual ecosystem gathering, we were already debating the event’s future focus. Complexity was driving new technology paths as we looked at how we’d engineer a global network of AI, IoT and 5G-driven devices from chip to cloud. We knew that dealing with that complexity would require fundamental changes in our techno... » read more

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