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John O | September 2016

Power Budget Remains a Concern for System Designers


earlier this month, anna steffor mutschler, executive editor at semiengineering.com, spoke with engineers about the power demands of systems that they are designing and how increasing the power budget has become a necessity and one of the biggest issues in electronics design.


“reaching the power budget: why power is still a problem, how it will get worse, and what can be done about it” (link to full article below) pointed out that power in chip design is one of the “most technically difficult aspects of design” and has been made particularly hard because engineers are working for companies that need to stay on the cutting edge with the newest features and better connectivity.

 

computer_chips_circuits_boards_600

(wikimedia commons)

of course, it all has to be packaged with a price point that will attract new consumers in a market that is being flooded by competitors all seeking the same slice of the pie.

 

mutschler wrote, “everything related to power in chip design today is a big deal—and it’s just getting bigger.”

 

in order to accomplish the necessary power budget goals, mutschler explained that there needs to be new tools for engineers in the design process. overall power budgets cannot be the only measure of a design’s success or failure. she writes that there must also be consideration of absolute power consumption, power redundancy and wasted power.

 

saurabh kumar shrimal, senior low-power technologist at mentor graphics, said, “it can no longer be just a game of traditional clock gating to save power. rtl designers will need to change multiple aspects of the design — register, combinational, clock tree, memory — to resolve the power problems. only with this approach will they know early enough in the design cycle where they stand in achieving their power budget and deliver the project on time and on budget.”

 

with the increasing density of components on chips and in systems, power and thermal management are important considerations for engineers, but mutschler noted that there is a need to get to market quickly with the latest innovation and that truncated design schedules have compressed the design process.

 

the engineers that mutschler spoke with gave examples of the innovative steps that they are trying to continue meeting the power budget needs of the systems that they are designing. from adding granularity into power management, techniques such as near-threshold performance, or using system-level vectors, there is a need for creativity in power and thermal management.

 

read “reaching the power budget: why power is still a problem, how it will get worse, and what can be done about it” at http://semiengineering.com/reaching-the-power-budget

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