The Hindu Business Line : Power efficiency, the new chip norm

Low-power loyalists: (From left) The Group R&D Director, Synopsys, Mr Srikanth Jadcherla; the India Country Director, Mr Subhash Bal; the Technical Solutions Architect, Ms Josefina Hobbs; and the Director, Low Power Solution Marketing, Mr Larry Vivolo, conducted the Eclypse Low Power seminar in Hyderabad recently. — Anand Parthasarathy

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore, May 4 Did that laptop singe your lap after half an hour of use? Was that feature-laden smart phone ‘too hot to handle’ after taking or making a dozen calls?

As device makers piled the features on increasingly smaller, more portable platforms, processors and chip sets took the heat — literally. Customers, however, have been unwilling to pay for must-have features if it meant a power-guzzling gadget that seemed — palpably — to contribute to global warming.

The consumer electronics industry has been forced to ‘cool IT’ — and the first initiatives have come from the chip makers whose products are often the main cause of all the heart — sorry, heat — burn.

New series

In recent weeks, Intel has launched a new series of low power processors under the name ‘Atom’ to fuel ultra mobile computing devices and the more compact notebooks. Rival AMD has its own new low power family, Phenom, and last week also unveiled new dual-core low power versions of its Athlon family, the X2.

It is also readying to offer dozens of PC and laptop designs under its new chip set brand, Puma, in June — with the USP being ‘power efficiency’. Via, the other PC processor favoured by budget machine makers, has its own power-aware range named Isaiah. Most of these consume power in the region of 20 to 45 watts — a sharp drop from 100 watts and more that the first multicore chips from most semiconductor majors demanded.

Clearly the tools to turn down the heat are there. But who is going to create the new designs translating the power efficiencies of the core processors into overall ‘cool’ tools for tomorrow?

To evangelise the concept of power efficient design and push disparate design groups towards a standardised way of achieving this, the US-based world leader in semiconductor design software, Synopsys, has launched a world-wide programme of EclypseLow Power Solution seminars for the electronic design community. Two sessions were recently in Noida and Hyderabad, but such is the size of the design engineering community in India that a third seminar has now been planned in Bangalore after the end of the global tour on July 11.

Eclypse is Synopsys’ own end-to-end suite of solutions to create low power, from design intent to implementation. Indeed, Mr Subhash Bal, their Country Manager for India, said low power was the number one concern for half of the company’s customers worldwide. “Most design teams are overwhelmed and under prepared to meet this new consumer demand,” he added.

Unified Power Format

To define low power, the industry is groping towards a Unified Power Format (UPF): it has been proposed as a new IEEE standard no P1801 (the P is for preliminary). Since almost 9 out of 10 low power designs end up as mobile phones, Synopsys has joined with ARM, the UK-based creator of ‘core’ designs that fuels almost all these phones. Together they have formulated a Low Power Methodology to help engineers achieve these designs in short order, said Mr Larry Vivolo, Synopsys’ Director for Low Power Design Marketing. The book, ‘Low Power Methodology Manual for system-on-a-chip design’, has been published by Springer but can be freely downloaded by Synopsys customers at www.arm.com/lpmm or www.synopsys.com/lpmm

Trimming functions

Mr Srikanth Jadcherla, US-based Group Director R&D (Verification Group), explained how energy savings can be achieved by trimming some appliance functions. Do you hard-switch-off your TV and entertainment system at night — or is the red bulb that makes the ‘remote’ work, always on?

A plasma TV that guzzles 166 watts of active power might take 0.18 kwh of idle power in a single day. In fact, almost 40 per cent of power consumed in US homes is wasted by such ‘standby’ systems, he added. In offering incentives for alternative energy sources and encouraging the manufacture of devices like solar photo voltaic cells, India is ahead of most countries, he said. In fact, it made sense to use DC power sources like solar because almost all consumer home devices converted AC mains power to low voltage DC anyway!

Ms Josefina Hobbs, the Technical Solutions Architect who shared Synopsys design experience with the assembled Indian engineers, suggested to them that ‘worst case design’ was no longer seen as a ‘best practice’: all systems in a device rarely needed to function all the time. Voltage control was the number one option to achieve low power designs.

ARM’s India Managing Director, Mr Anil Gupta, and nVidia’s Senior Engineer, Mr Sree Reddy, shared their experiences in realising compelling low power designs.

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