Better PMIC Design Using Multi-Physics Simulation


Energy efficiency and thermal management are gaining importance in the IC and system design community. Because the integrated circuit is the major source of power consumption and hence heat dissipation, semiconductor companies are under immense pressure to reduce the overall power envelope of the IC that goes into the system. This phenomenon is seen globally, irrespective of whether the chip... » read more

System-Level Verification Tackles New Role


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advances in system-level verification with Larry Melling, product management director for the system verification group of [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Larry Lapides, vice president of sales for [getentity id="22036" e_name="Imperas”] and Jean-Marie Brunet, director of marketing for the emulation division of [getentity id="22017" e_nam... » read more

FinFET Scaling Reaches Thermal Limit


In 1974, Robert H. Dennard was working as an IBM researcher. He introduced the idea that MOSFETs would continue to work as voltage-controlled switches in conjunction with shrinking features, providing doping levels, the chip's geometry, and voltages are scaled along with those size reductions. This became known as Dennard's Law even though, just like Moore's Law, it was anything but a law. T... » read more

Three Common SoC Power Management Myths


SoCs are power-sensitive. Sometimes SoCs are sensitive because designers worry about the impact they have on the end product battery life. Sometimes designers worry about the effects of dissipating too much power on packaging and thermal issues. Sometimes designers are simply worried about the massive cooling budgets of data centers generating heat from thousands of their chips running in serve... » read more

Engineering The Internet Of Things


All around us connected devices are proliferating. New, innovative products are emerging almost daily, and familiar products are benefiting from newer, smarter functionality. These developments come with the promise of making us healthier and safer, as well as more efficient, innovative, competitive and profitable. The Internet of Things, or IoT, which holds great potential, also presents new c... » read more

System-Level Verification Tackles New Role


Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, gave the keynote at DVCon this year. He said that if you pull together a bunch of pre-verified IP blocks, it does not change the verification problem at the system level. That sounds like a problem. There are assumptions made that the IP blocks work to a reasonable degree, and that when performing system-level verification the focus is not a... » read more

Power Analysis Plus Power Management


In my earlier blogs we've heard from some of the experts on using UPF in the successive refinement flow. We’ve talked about controlling leakage power, bringing power down, and validating power management behavior using coverage and simulation, including debug and clock domain crossing verification. In order to do the last step in the successive refinement flow, you need to use emulation be... » read more

Talk Fast And Stop


Power management. If you’re responsible for the design of low-power, energy-efficient electronic systems and SoCs, you need to have a power management strategy and you need to know as soon as possible if it will meet the demands of your product and its target applications. For example, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is a power management strategy that adjusts the frequency an... » read more

Developing Effective Design Strategies For Today’s Wearable Devices: Power Management


As the next wave of wearable devices expands into a new class of revolutionary and innovative products, there will be a growing importance placed on the real-time operating system (RTOS) and corresponding middleware. Wearable System-on-Chip (SoC) processors require an operating system optimized for size and performance with power-efficient wireless connectivity options needed for machine-to-mac... » read more

The Latest Power Management Techniques For Wearable Devices


Wearable devices are popping up everywhere — across all markets. In part one of this wearables white paper series, I wrote about the market and technical factors driving the development and adoption of wearable devices. In part two, we roll up our sleeves and address one of the key requirements for wearable devices. Ah yes, power management. You don’t need super powers to see th... » read more

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