Reducing Software Power


With the slowdown of Moore's Law, every decision made in the past must be re-examined to get more performance or lower power for a given function. So far, software has remained relatively unaffected, but it could be an untapped area for optimization and enable significant power reduction. The general consensus is that new applications such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, whe... » read more

Accurate Power Analysis Using Real Software Workloads


Over the last decade or so, power consumption has become a major issue in the design of many types of electronic products. Of course, power has always mattered for battery-operated devices, but the complexity of portable electronics and the size of the chips they contain have grown significantly. For plugged-in devices, from desktop computers to server racks in a data center, power plays a majo... » read more

Target: 50% Reduction In Memory Power


Memory consumes about 50% or more of the area and about 50% of the power of an SoC, and those percentages are likely to increase. The problem is that static random access memory (SRAM) has not scaled in accordance with Moore's Law, and that will not change. In addition, with many devices not chasing the latest node and with power becoming an increasing concern, the industry must find ways to... » read more

Using Analog For AI


If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and the compute platforms for them may be overlooking an alternative technology—analog. The semiconductor industry has a firm understanding of digital electronics and has been very successful making it scale. It is predictable, has good yield, and while every de... » read more

Power Issues Grow For Cloud Chips


Performance levels in traditional or hyperscale data centers are being limited by power and heat caused by an increasing number of processors, memory, disk and operating systems within servers. The problem is so complex and intertwined, though, that solving it requires a series of steps that hopefully add up to a significant reduction across a system. But at 7nm and below, predicting exactly... » read more

Enabling Cheaper Design


While the EDA industry tends to focus on cutting edge designs, where design costs are a minor portion of the total cost of product, the electronics industry has a very long tail. The further along the tail you go, the more significant design costs become as a percent of total cost. Many of those designs are traditionally built using standard parts, such as microcontrollers, but as additional... » read more

Data Center Power Poised To Rise


The big power-saving effort that kept U.S. data-center power consumption low for the past decade may not keep the lid on much longer. Faced with the possibility that data centers would consume a disastrously large percentage of the world's power supply, data center owners, and players in the computer, semiconductor, power and cooling industries ramped up effort to improve the efficiency of e... » read more

DDR4 Board Design And Signal Integrity Verification Challenges


This paper, originally presented at DesignCon and nominated for a best paper award, includes an investigation of DDR4's Pseudo Open Drain driver and what its use means for power consumption and Vref levels for the receivers. This paper also examines a DDR4 system design example and the need for simulating with IBIS power aware models versus transistor level models for Simultaneous Switching ... » read more

Reducing Power Consumption in Mobile Applications with High-Speed Gear3 MIPI M-PHY IP


Mobile systems require increasing data volume for multiple chip-to-chip interfaces. The high-speed MIPI® M-PHY is tailored for mobile systems where performance, power, and efficiency are key criteria. With up to 5,824 Mbps bandwidth, the speed meets devices’ high bandwidth and scalability requirements. The M-PHY is designed to accommodate the intermittent nature of inter-chip communications ... » read more

The Power Game


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Semiconductor engineering teams always have focused on stepping up performance in new designs, but in the mobile, GPU and tablet markets they’re finding that maintaining the balance between higher performance and the same or lower power is increasingly onerous. The reason: Extreme gaming applications can create scenario files that cause dynamic power consumpt... » read more

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