An industry survey some three years ago indicated only about one-quarter of all chip designers were using dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). It’s likely most of those people who said they were implementing DVFS are deeply dependent upon a mobile operating system. For instance, Android offers a range of CPU governor software modules to […]

For those of you that have been reading my blogs or watching my presentations for a while, you will know I like to use cars for analogies. They represent a system that everyone understands at a user level, they are composed of many subsystems, the details of which can get pretty complicated if you dig […]

Microamp-per-megahertz thinking served the microcontroller (MCU) community well for decades. As the focus shifts to connectivity and always-on use cases, bigger cores and wireless IP blocks push energy use in the wrong direction. Next-generation MCUs can ill afford to spend more energy just to manage themselves. Any mandatory software to make an MCU run usually […]

Interview with a Power Management Architect Dynamic Power Management has become a ‘must-have’ in Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) design today because of tightening power budgets and rising transistor counts. These increases mainly stem from evolving market requirements for more device functionality and richer feature sets being made available to meet changing market requirements. The semiconductor industry has […]

Recently I attended a presentation at the Machine Learning Developers Conference held at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The presentation, “Overcoming the Memory System Challenge in Dataflow Processing”, was given jointly by Darren Jones of Wave Computing and Drew Wingard of Sonics. The presentation was indeed fascinating as Jones first described how dataflow processors are […]

Last summer at 53DAC in Austin, Sonics rolled out a seminar with a formative strategy for its Energy Processing Unit, or EPU. After that session, I summarized the idea in my SemiWiki blog: “The premise of an EPU is that power savings using software, even in a dedicated microcontroller, is relatively slow, perhaps 50 to […]

Understanding the intrinsic value of Intellectual Property is like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder.  The beholder of IP Value is ultimately the user/consumer of that IP – the buyers. Buyers tend to value IP based upon their ability to utilize that IP to create competitive advantage, and therefore higher value for […]

The concept of Agile design has been in practice for a long time.  Agile Software development is probably most universally practiced in part because a robust support ecosystem exists: from tool suppliers and consultants to the techniques new generations of software developers are taught in school.  If I narrow my focus to just the design […]

Power management in IC design is loaded with exciting new developments. There have been attempts to solve power-related issues by altering the overall semiconductor process, biasing selected portions of a design, implementing various power distribution structures, introducing power gating, changing on chip network architectures, introducing microprocessor-based power channels, introducing energy processing units, and even more. […]

Doing business with Sonics has never been easier than in 2017. We just launched a re-designed web site that provides everything you need to know about our EPU and NoC technologies in a quick and easy to find format. Whether you are a power architect looking to save energy or an SoC designer searching for […]