July 01, 2009
DAC votes for power management
By Nicolas Mokhoff

Power management is being taken seriously by the design automation community. Design Automation Conference organizers have released the votes, and "Power Scavenging: Waste Not, Want Not" won as DAC's first "community-driven" DAC Pavilion panel.

In a very close race, a month-long vote resulted in 35 percent of voters selecting the power scavenging topic.

The new community-driven selection process is apparently DAC's ongoing efforts to have its program address the needs of not only EDA developers and researchers, but also IC designers and design tool users.

"It was very important to us to provide this opportunity to the design community to participate in the setting of the conference agenda, and we are heartened by the excellent response," said Rich Goldman, chairman of the Pavilion Panel Committee.

The committee's statement: "With power consumption an ever-more-limiting design and system challenge, a panel of experts will discuss unexploited and hidden sources of power and how to harness them for some of today's most complex applications."

Apparently hundreds of EDA industry voters chose among the four possible topics: wearable sensor networks; power scavenging; the collision of mobile and PC technologies; and career survival advice during the current economic situation.

You would think at in this prolonged recession this last topic would be a more favorite one to explore.

Nice to see that the engineering community still has a flair for tackling a real engineering problem: power management.

Panelists for the community panel will include: Professor Sandeep Kundu of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Steve Grady of Cymbet; and Mark Buccini of Texas Instruments. Chip Design Magazine's editor John Blyler will moderate the panel.

If you're at DAC, don't forget Management Day consisting of three sessions on July 28.

I'll be chairing "Trade-Offs and Choices for Emerging SOCs." "Decision Making for Complex SOCs," will be chaired by Ed Sperling of System Level Design and "Making Critical Decisions for Emerging SOC Development," moderated by Peggy Aycinena, EDA Confidential and a guest blogger on the EDA DesignLine site.

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June 24, 2009
'Green' is a journey, not a destination
By Nicolas Mokhoff

In its case for "Green Tech Innovation" some companies will promise more than they can deliver. There may be one semiconductor company that can deliver what it promises. Maybe.

In a recent "Power Green" event in the Big Apple Samsung Semiconductor tried to convince its audience that the company has been in "green drive" mode for a while, and is making a difference in data centers.

Jim Elliott, Vice President Memory Marketing for Samsung Semiconductor, Inc., listed two reasons for why the current economic climate will drive the need for innovation and differentiation. and "Samsung is innovating and differentiating": data centers consume more power than all the TVs in the U.S.; 12 million servers are more thasn four years old and are runing inefficiently.

"New servers based on DDR3 memory chips can save energy, footprint and TCO," said Elliott. "At the same workload a new DDR3 server covers the task of 9 older servers with 61 percent reduced power, proviing 40,000KWh/yr energy saving, and savigs close to $10,000 yearly of operating expenses.

Elliott said that with 3 percent of U.S. electricity being used by data centers by 2011 using DDR3 and solid state drives should reduce that to 2.25 percent.

To that end, Samsung Electronic has developed what they claim is "the world's first 32 Gigabyte DDR3 module" for use in server systems. The new module operates at 1.35-volts which should go along way in support of the global trend to cut power usage in mass storage computing environments.

What's interesting about Samsung's approach is that while they hail their feats about every percentage point saved by customers using their parts, they concede that there are mitigating circumstances that will dominate user desisions going forward. "Products must perform, and green cannot supersede," said Elliott.

He listed customers' responses to Samsung's queries as to how they expect to go green.

When it comes to the required features, functions and performance respondents reiterate that product features and functions are of greatest importance; environmental consciousness and price come after product benefits.

Also, respondents say they are willing to budge somewhat on product cost if it means environmental consciousness (most specifically reduced energy consumption), but only to an extent. And finally the Total Cost of Ownership has to have a break-even point that is attainable quickly if not immediately.

The only anomoly: In Seattle, consumers were willing to pay up to 30 percent more, while other markets were willing to pay 10-20 percent more, for more efficient power.

Must be all that "green" coffee they drink up there.

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June 17, 2009
The color of white
By Nicolas Mokhoff

There's a lot to be said about predictions. Color them red. Then there is a lot to be said about being part of a fad. Color that green. Sometimes it's better to start over on a white canvas.

The "iSuppli: Gear costs to derail Moore's Law in 2014" story brought out an interesting reaction from an IBM program manager.

He calls for brainstorming on the kind of special applications that might make use of finer geometries and would justify the investment of chasing Moore's Law. Alternatively, he lists current applications like medical instrumentation, space exploration, oil drilling as apps that might not need denser chips.

Maybe chasing Moore's Law is not for everybody?

Samsung held an event in the Big Apple to outline the company's eco-friendly technologies.

Samsung's green strategy covers the gamut of this electronics powerhouse: from LED backlit TVs to memory chips that enable longer battery life and sleeker designs for today's mobile phones and netbooks.

We are becoming used to having consumer electronics companies hype up the "green" effect of their products. But now Samsung is claiming clean semiconductor devices: LEDs that save LCD backlighting power, and low-power DRAMs that consume "less" power than those of rivals.

I get suspicious about predictions that have a red stop sign at the end of a timeline. And I don't like being led astray by "green" companies looking to ride the latest cool wave.

Let's stick to facts and use a clean white board to design power management solutions in practical applications that can be used today.

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June 10, 2009
Perspiration still beats innovation
By Nicolas Mokhoff

Powervation, the fabless semiconductor spin-out from the Circuits & Systems Research Center (CSRC) at the University of Limerick in 2006, originally received $10 million Series A round of venture capital funding led by Intel Capital and Scottish Equity Partners with Venture Tech Alliance. Next week the results of that funding will be obvious.

Powervation has been working on a digital chip that controls the amount of energy supplied to microprocessors. The ultimate goal is to have digital control displace incumbent analog-based control.

CSRC has worked on the core technology since 2001. Monday is the official unveiling of Powervation's new class of Auto-control digital power ICs.

According to Powervation, the chips promise power supply designers a "no compromises" solution impervious to variations in component values and applications context, making it easier to build complex designs that conform to today's stringent energy-efficient standards.

One impressive data point that Powervation emphasizes is cost. The company claims that Auto-control reduces the component count in a system design by 50 percent compared to alternate solutions, which translates to a 30 percent reduction in system-level costs.

I guess it pays to hire a good team. Among the eight executives heading the company there is some 150 years of experience, from the semiconductor and power supply industries.

Asked who its most likely competitor in this space, Powervation's director of marketing Benoit Herve points to Texas Instruments.

Look for the story on this site for the details on this chip and draw your own conclusions.

Just to keep it interesting Powervation made the list of one of ten European power management start ups to watch in 2009.
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