Low Power Blogs

Key findings: 5X to 32X faster low-power verification using Palladium XP emulation It’s hot in July in Korea, and not just the temperature; the ideas, too. The ideas that flowed at CDNLive Korea were exciting, and that includes a very interesting talk by Jiyeon Park from the System LSI division of Samsung Electronics. His talk, titled “Enabling Low-Power Verification using Cadence Palladium XP,” struck a chord with...

Freescale was a successful Incisive ® simulation CPF low-power user when they decided to step up their game. In November 2013, at CDNLive India, they presented a paper explaining how they improved their ability to find power-related bugs using a more sophisticated verification flow. We were able to catch up with Abhinav Nawal just after his presentation to capture this video explaining the key points in his paper. ...

ST Microelectronics reported their success with IEEE 1801 / UPF low-power simulation using Incisive Enterprise Simulator at CDNLive India in November 2013. We were able to meet with Mohit Jain just after his presentation and recorded this video that explains the key points in his paper. With eight years of experience and pioneering technology in native low-power simulation, Mohit was able to apply Incisive Enterprise...

If you weren't able to attend the 2013 DVCon, you missed out on a great IEEE 1801/UPF tutorial delivered by members of the IEEE committee. Accellera had the event recorded and that recording is now posted on the Accellera.or g website. Regardless of your work so far with low power design and verification, you need to watch this video. Power management is becoming ubiquitous in our world. The popular aspect is that...

There is no better way other than a self-help training kit -- (rapid adoption kit, or RAK) -- to demonstrate the Incisive Enterprise Simulator's IEEE 1801 / UPF low-power features and its usage. The features include: Unique SimVision debugging Patent-pending power supply network visualization and debugging Tcl extensions for LP debugging Support for Liberty file power description Standby mode support...

DAC is right around the corner! On the demo floor at Cadence® Booth #2214, we will demonstrate how to use the Cadence mixed-signal and low-power solution to design, verify, and implement a microcontroller-based mixed-signal design. The demo design architecture is very similar to practical designs of many applications like power management ICs, automotive controllers, and the Internet of Things (IoT...

The IEEE has announced the publication of the new 1801-2013 standard, also known as UPF 2.1, and immediate availability for free download through the IEEE 1801-2013 Get Program . Even though the standard is new to the whole world, for the people of the IEEE working group this standard is finally done and is in the past now. There is a Chinese saying "好事多磨" which means "good things take time to happen." I forgot the...

On May 7, 2013 Cadence announced a 30% productivity gain in the June 2013 Incisive Enterprise Simulator 13.1 release . Advanced debug visualization, faster turn-around time, and the extension of eight years of low-power verification innovation to IEEE 1801/UPF are the key capabilities in the release. When we talk about low-power verification its easy to equate it with simulation. For certain, simulation is the heart...

I noticed some very interesting news last week, widely reported in the technical press, and you can find the source press release here . In a nutshell, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) has formed a group to look at benchmarks for ultra low power microcontrollers. Initially chaired by Horst Diewald, chief architect of MSP430 TM microcontrollers at Texas Instruments, the group's line-up is an impressive...

All engineers can enhance their mixed-signal low-power structural verification productivity by learning while doing with a PIEA RAK (Power Intent Export Assistant Rapid Adoption Kit). They can verify the mixed-signal chip by a generating macromodel for their analog block automatically, and run it through Conformal Low Power (CLP) to perform a low power structural check. The power structure integrity of a mixed-signal...

On October 18, 2012 Cadence held a Low-Power Technology Summit at our San Jose, California headquarters. Experts from Cadence and other leading companies presented the latest low-power design methodologies. Well, it took us a while but you can now view the material via the Low-Power Technology Summit Proceedings archive, which just went live. We've put both video and PDF versions of the presentations there. Obviously...

The recent Low-Power Technology Summit held at Cadence headquarters in San Jose gave us a great opportunity to take the pulse of low-power design by surveying the attendees. Some of the data we got was expected, but there were a couple of surprises. First, some of the expected stuff. We'd noticed in the last major surveys done almost two years ago (see the Perspective on Power blog from December 2010) that advanced...

It looks like it might be standing room only for latecomers to the Low-Power Technology Summit at Cadence headquarters building 10 auditorium this Thursday (18 October). Registration has been very strong. I'm expecting a great day -- we have a full agenda covering multiple aspects of low-power design. No longer the sole preserve of designers needing to extend battery life, low-power design has become ubiquitous in...

So your team just specified its first design with power management circuits. The designers are telling you, its just a few power shut-off domains defined by CPF or UPF. The verification should be easy-peasy right? Wrong. Each domain has complete controls, isolation, and retention. As a verification engineer, you know that any test could trigger a power change either intentionally or in error. How do you build your environment...

CDNLive! is back with a bang in 2012, with very strong support from the Cadence user community worldwide. We're three-quarters the way through the events at the time of writing -- you can see the whole program on www.cadence.com at the CDNLive! 2012 Worldwide page. Proceedings are published so far from San Jose, USA; Munich, Germany; and Hsinchu, Taiwan. If you click on those proceedings links, you get to a multitude...

Why do you define macro models? Luke Lang , Engineering Director at Cadence, says that "Just because you have a hard macro doesn't mean you need to define a macro model: A single-domain hard macro without any low power component should be black-boxed. A macro model is not necessary." Luke further elaborates: "Custom IP blocks and analog macros often contain low-power features. A pure black box makes verification and...

Early summer is a good time to visit Europe. I was there for the first couple of weeks in July, before most of Europe disappears on vacation. I spent my time mainly with customers in Germany, Ireland and the UK. It's not the weather that makes it a good time to visit - while it was nice in Germany the Northern European summer has been a disappointment so far, although the two days I spent in Scotland were, I'm told,...

Low-power design promises to be a key theme of the Design Automation Conference once again! At DAC 2012 at San Francisco's Moscone Center next week (June 4-7), if you need to cover design, implementation and verification of this important subject, there's a lot to choose from at Cadence's booth #1930. Here is a quick guide to presentations, demos and other events Cadence is involved with for low-power, as well as the...

Hats off to Brian Bailey! If you haven't been following his EDA Designline Power Series on eetimes.com you have been missing out. Throughout April, he's been running a pretty comprehensive series of editorials, opinion pieces and contributed articles on the subject of low power design. As he put it: "I doubt if the EDA Designline, or in fact any Designline in the history of EE Times has ever had anything close to the...

Humans learn with their hands and, it turns out, electrical engineers are humans. Most of us fondly recall "experiments" we did that made electrical engineering our destiny. But what of the current generation? Have apps deadened the EE in the way video killed the radio star? I am happy to report that the answer, for one future EEs at least, is a resounding "power up!" For some strange reason, my oldest son thinks EE...

In a recent CDNLive! Silicon Valley presentation titled "Low Power Implementation on the Freescale Kinetis Family," Annis Jarrar from Freescale demonstrated how various low power design techniques were used in the popular Kinetis low power platform. These techniques included power gating with state retention, dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS), body biasing, and multi-bit flip-flops. Even though each technique...

When asked why the use of assertions for low power is rising, I say “at 40nm and below, the chips are just going to melt.” Ann Steffora Mutschler, you quoted me perfectly in your “ Avoiding Chip Melt ” article! Assertions are just the tip of the low-power verification iceberg. (Yep: iceberg + low-power +melting chips = metaphorical mayhem!) Kidding aside, in the article, both Erich Marschner from Mentor and I cite the...

CDNLive! Silicon Valley, taking place at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose, CA next week from March 13-14, 2012, brings together Cadence technology users, developers, and industry experts to network, share best practices on critical design and verification issues, and discover new techniques for realizing advanced silicon, SoCs, and systems. This year's theme is Connect, Share and Inspire. There's a particularly strong...

At Cadence, we often get asked about various low-power design techniques: how well they work, what are the implementation and verification issues associated with them, and how effective they are at various process nodes. As a general trend we see aggressive power reduction techniques being adopted more widely as many designs, and by no means only mobile designs, become increasingly power-sensitive. But while many advanced...

Low power has become a major consideration in chip design in almost all applications. One major achievement of the industry over the past a few years is the alignment on the low power design methodology, which was considered as the biggest hurdle to automate advanced low power design techniques. No matter whether you are using the Common Power Format (CPF) or Unified Power Format (UPF), the methodology is the same -...