Simple Does Not Mean Easy


When it comes to chip design we speak constantly about managing complexity - how best to architect for it, how to manage it, what design techniques to use, what the impact on the system will be etc. - but we don't speak too much about making the design more simple. Instead, we heap on more complexity to manage the complexity. As with everything else in life it seems just because something is... » read more

On-Chip MCUs Excel At Power Management


By Ann Steffora Mutschler When it comes to supplying power to an SoC, there is an increasing trend to make it more intelligent—how to control it more accurately, how it is monitored and how it communicates with different aspects of the chip. Traditional power supply models with analog supplies have less of this control, so a number of engineering teams are considering the use of on-chip m... » read more

Experts At The Table: Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss power format changes with Sushma Hoonavera-Prasad, design engineer in Broadcom’s mobile platform group; John Biggs, consultant engineer for R&D and co-founder of ARM; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence; and Jeffrey Lee, corporate ap... » read more

Too Big To Handle?


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the insatiable demand for power efficiency today, the power management tasks have been pushed up into the realm of the software engineer due to the sheer complexity of the hardware design and the demands on the hardware designer to get their part right. Managing power properly in embedded software boils down to really understanding the application and how it i... » read more

Life After Smartphones


By Frank Ferro Don’t let the title confuse you. Smartphones are not going away anytime soon. In fact this year’s smartphone shipments have exceeded feature phones for the first time, with a total of 216 million units in Q1, according to IDC, and the overall mobile phone market is expected to grow 4.3% in 2013. This volume represents an increase in smartphone sales of 42% from Q1 2012. ... » read more

Power? It’s The Apps, Stupid!


Shabtay Matalon When I bought my first iPhone, I envisioned using it mostly to make phone calls and occasionally to view e-mails and browse the Web. For navigation, I used a separate GPS. But all this changed when I realized that I can use the Waze App on my iPhone for real-time navigation or to play games while listening to music on a boring coast-to-coast domestic flight. These new “apps�... » read more

Improved Efficiency


By Bhanu Kapoor We constantly hear about process technology advances and their impact on power consumption of ICs, but the power management techniques have remained the same over last few process technology generations. Power gating, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, and threshold voltage scaling have been the key power management techniques since the 90nm process technology. Clock gating... » read more

A Balancing Act


By Ann Steffora Mutschler If you stay current on data center trends, you are well-versed on the fact that Intel reported last June energy proportionality has effectively doubled server efficiency and workload scaling beyond what Moore’s Law predicted. What does this have to do with power management of SoCs? Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys, said tha... » read more

Power Management: Throwing Down The Gauntlet


By Frank Ferro The recent burst of articles challenging smart phone battery life has me asking the question, “Are we ready to turn the corner on power consumption?” About two years ago I was bemoaning the fact that we are willing to live with a smart phone that gets only one day of battery life (Powering Forward or Moon Walking). As of today, nothing has changed. We still need to charge th... » read more

Good Times For Analog Designers


By Ann Steffora Mutschler For a number of technological reasons, analog/mixed-signal design and low-power design are converging, and with that comes both challenges and opportunities. As far as challenges go, process variations at 14nm, 20nm and even 28nm have increased significantly to include DFM impacts such as layout-delay effects. On the digital side, those process changes affect... » read more

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