Verification Quality Comes Into Focus


Across the board, when I talk with people about power management verification or any verification actually, the topic of quality always comes up. The first plan of attack is to look at coverage: how it is managed, how to perform coverage in a more constructed way. Ellie Burns at Mentor Graphics mentioned that because UPF can define all of the states of the system, the states of the power man... » read more

Formal Low-Power Verification Of Power-Aware Designs


Power reduction and management methods are now all pervasive in system- on-chip (SoC) designs. They are used in SoCs targeted at power-critical applications ranging from mobile appliances with limited battery life to big-box electronics that consume large amounts of increasingly expensive power. Power reduction methods are now applied throughout the chip design flow from architectural design th... » read more

Capturing Performance


The challenge of working out the best performance for a given power budget is not a new one, but in many power-sensitive applications, the balance is tricky and requires sophisticated techniques. This is especially true in the media processor market where many systems companies are held back by power, energy and thermal issues. “It's really not a battery problem, it's a thermal problem... » read more

UPF-Driven RTL Power Budgeting For Energy-Efficient Designs


Energy efficiency of devices has become more critical than ever, with shrinking geometries and increased performance requirements of SoCs in applications ranging from mobile, storage, automotive to processors. Power management, therefore, becomes an important part of IP and SoC design methodology. While power management is critical in all design stages, an important aspect of this methodolog... » read more

Are More Processor Cores Better?


Up until the early 2000s, each generation of processor was faster, used more exotic architectures, had deeper pipelines, used more transistors, ran at higher clock frequencies and consumed more power. In fact power was rising faster than performance and led to the extrapolation that within a few generations, processors would run as hot as nuclear reactors. Something had to change, and that c... » read more

Balancing Implementation Time, Complexity, Schedule


Design complexity today is demanding all the creativity a design engineer can muster to figure out the best ways to optimize a design for the power situation the device will be operating under. Advanced techniques are being leveraged, to be sure, but in varying degrees, perhaps in part because these techniques impact the complexity of the design implementation. If there are four or five ... » read more

How Effective Power Management Increases The Lifetime Operation Of Portable Medical Devices


To enable remote patient care and provide increased mobility in hospital settings portable medical devices, Personal Area Networks (PANs), and home health systems are seeing a significant increase in investment spending. When designing a portable medical device, decisions on processor and component selection are dependent on a range of variables which include performance, price, quality, and re... » read more

Power IS Top Priority, Isn’t It?


While I don’t mean to start a battle – or maybe I do! – I heard something last week during DAC that gave me pause. The person I was speaking with – who told me they ‘got in a little bit of trouble’ for saying this – reminded me of an interesting subject we had talked about previously, namely, that they did not believe power is the number one concern of engineering teams today. Ye... » read more

Power Management Techniques For Smart Grid Devices


Energy efficiency is a top concern among developers building connected devices for the smart grid. Initially, the application-centric approach to building a device was used. But today, with sophisticated hardware power management features available on most modern processors, this is no longer the case. What’s needed is an OS-level approach that allows developers to take advantage of the full ... » read more

Mostly Accurate Computing


“Approximate computing” is a new concept in computers, allowing them to perform calculations for certain tasks that don’t require perfect accuracy with the goal of improving efficiency and reducing energy consumption. But do the concepts apply when it comes to managing power? And is there a philosophical approach when it comes to thinking about power management? To a large extent, that... » read more

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