In last month’s blog, we discussed and compared various power techniques. A quick recap of these power techniques is shown in figure 1. Selecting between them is often quite challenging. These ...

Engineers are accustomed to making tradeoffs when designing products — faster and more power-hungry, or slower and lower-power; expensive and durable, or cheap and disposable; and so on. The ongoing ...

Low-power IC design techniques have been around for quite a while. They weren’t always required, though they were nice to have. The rapid growth of the consumer market for battery-powered devices has ...

Nearly all designs at advanced process nodes need some sort of power-saving strategy. As more designs employ advanced low-power techniques, design teams are discovering huge implementation hurdles ...

Power plants are designed to operate at their highest efficiency. Once a plant goes into operation, however, real life takes over and sometimes design outcomes are not regularly realized. Improving ...

Redundancy in power sources, including multiple utility feeds and paralleling generators, is crucial for ensuring continuous operation during outages. Proper load assessment and equipment redundancy ...

ASIC design teams face a growing problem. ASIC power-consumption estimates that take place before the design phase lack both scope and credibility. These shortcomings affect process, design, and IP ...

In the last blog, Low-power Hydra, I discussed how power has become a challenge to many designers, even at advanced process nodes. I also recommended that designers should start looking at the design ...