low-power design

System-level power is the next frontier for a power-intent standard – or rather a collection of them – being developed by a partnership between Accellera, Si2 and the IEEE.

FinFETs present a number of problems with respect to dynamic power consumption. Design techniques are being re-evaluated to deal with the issue.

Software for energy-harvesting designs needs to cope with sudden power failures. FRAM storage can reduce the power and performance penalties of full resets.

ARM has revealed a number of details of the microarchitecture that underpins its flagship Cortex-A72 as the processor moves towards its production release.

Combining assertion-based verification techniques with emulation makes for easier debug, better coverage and greater functional efficiency.

A look at the challenges of designing chips for the Internet of Things, or IoT, and some of the responses to those challenges

Emulation and simulation acceleration technologies provide the means to more efficiently detect power issues before tapeout – and find the worst-case modes that need to be fixed.

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.

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.

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.