System-level design

The 55th Design Automation Conference (DAC) will cover many topics for chip and system designers

Normally, silicon scaling is a good thing. Except when you are making power devices, as people working in the automotive semiconductor business explained at the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference this week in Dresden. Klaus Meder, president of the automotive electronics division at Robert Bosch, explained in his keynote speech that denser devices are causing headaches when ...

The Texas Instruments MSP430 is practically synonymous with low-power processors and, although the company may not care much for the idea of clones of the architecture appearing, that is being helped by a crop of research processors that explore the limits of the threshold voltage of CMOS transistors. These designs are helping to push the MSP430 into lower-power territory than ...

Low-Power Engineering has posted the last instalment of its round-table interviews on making software more energy efficient and some of the problems that face an industry that needs to expose low-level hardware details through a compiler-insulated interface.

Transaction-level modelling and system-level analysis are important tasks for any low-power design activity given the major savings that can be made at this level: simply stopping transactions from repeating needlessly pays big in terms of reducing circuit activity and, with it, energy usage. So, a new release in the SystemC world is something to watch and version 2.3 of the ...

It’s the season for predictions and Brian Bailey, writing at EDN points out some power-related issues among other predictions made by some of the people he asked.

Linus Torvalds has signed off on the latest release of the Linux kernel, version 3.2, and it contains several additions aimed at power-management. The new code modules have been submitted over the past year by engineers working at Samsung and Texas Instruments, among others. Linux 3.1, completed late last year, also included some tools for power monitoring: cpupowerutils. The latest ...

When looking at new architectures for low-power operation, it is easy to get fixated on one part of the design and ignore the ramifications for the rest of the system. The consequences of that are demonstrated in a paper that was presented at last year’s International Symposium on Low-Power Electronic Design in Japan. Rami Abdallah, Pradeep Shenoy, Naresh Shanbhag and ...

With its Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas looming, the Consumer Electronics Association has published figures claiming that electronic devices still account for a relatively small share of the electricity consumption in the average US home. Or at least they did in 2010. The figures were put together by the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems based on data collected ...

At his View from the Top blog, Achim Nohl writes about the longstanding problem of software failing to take advantage of the power-saving facilities offered by hardware, if not subverting them entirely. The key in his view, and it’s hard to disagree lies in providing better information on power consumption to the software engineers as they write, test and debug ...