low-power design

October 18, 2014
Soft-blocked floorplan

Placement optimizations push power and clock on Cortex-M7 project

Soft blocking to prevent cell spreading and other placement-optimization techniques helped improve power and clock speed on a Cortex-M7 test chip designed by ARM and Cadence.
October 6, 2014
Power grid signal track blocking

ARM, TSMC design explores 16nm finFET issues

ARM and TSMC used an extensive pre-planning process, including a static analysis of each module's overall logic structure, to put together a 2.3GHz processor design based around ARM's main 64bit Big.Little pairing for the foundry's 16nm finFET process.
Article  |  Topics: EDA - IC Implementation  |  Tags: , , , , ,   |  Organizations: ,
September 18, 2014

Using optimized design flows to meet PPA goals for SoC processor cores

How tuning a design flow can help optimize SoC processor cores for power, performance and area - and make it possible to do different optimisations for different cores on the same SoC.
July 13, 2014
ST/CEA-Leti 'Frisbee' wide-voltage DSP

DVFS and body bias

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling is effective for low-power VLSI design. Body or back bias can provide additional control over leakage and performance.
Guide  |  Topics: EDA - IC Implementation  |  Tags: , , , ,
May 29, 2014
Near-threshold computing for minimum energy - thumbnail

Near-threshold and subthreshold logic

By taking the circuit supply voltage close to that of the threshold voltage or even below, it is possible to optimize low-power VLSI design. But there are pitfalls.
May 15, 2014
Bill Neifert is chief technology officer of Carbon Design Systems. Bill has designed high-performance verification and system integration solutions, and also developed an architecture and coding style for high-performance RTL simulation in C/C++.

Bringing true power analysis to hardware/software co-design

While some HW/SW co-design and verification techniques are in place, a power analysis methodology is only just emerging
April 28, 2014

Overcoming the power/performance paradox in processor IP

The configurability of processor IP such as Synopsys' ARC HS family gives designers the option to optimise for power, performance or a combination of both.
Article  |  Topics: IP - Selection  |  Tags: , ,   |  Organizations:
April 16, 2014
Pranav Ashar

Reset optimization pays big dividends before simulation

Reset is no longer simply an 'X' issue but also feeds into power optimization. Catching issues early greatly speeds verification.
Expert Insight  |  Topics: EDA - Verification  |  Tags: , ,   |  Organizations:
January 30, 2014
Colin Walls

Power management in embedded systems – new thinking required

Effective low-power design for embedded-systems will take a new culture of close collaboration between hardware and software engineers.
November 1, 2013
Jack Erickson is director of product management at Cadence Design Systems.

Slow winter or new spring for hardware design?

Problems with process scaling make it seem as though the long era of innovative, lucrative hardware design is coming to an end. But is that really the case?
Expert Insight  |  Topics: EDA - ESL  |  Tags: , , ,   |  Organizations:

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