Passing the press box stunt: power management issues that are not known to SoC designers

Core Tips for Electronic Enthusiasts: Today's system designers benefit from the huge investment in chip-level power management by chip system (SoC) designers. But for systems with very low energy consumption, the system design team must know how to actually do SoC power management. They must plan power consumption for the entire system. They must build accurate models for the system usage patterns experienced by end users. These are not simple tasks, and putting all of these methods together is not enough. System designers must understand the on-chip power management process and the interactions between other parts of the system, or they may find that minimizing power consumption can result in reduced efficiency or even severe failure.

These puzzles don't gradually become easier over time. Chip designers have tried many ways to improve energy efficiency and come up with ideas that sound very radical. In a panel discussion at this year's Design Automation Conference (DAC), TI expert Clive Bittlestone said: "There are many ways we are trying to use them all. Chip designers want to minimize power consumption and ignore returns, which may lead to Aggravating the work of system designers. For energy conservation, system design is a new frontier. Bittlestone admits: "At the transistor level, we have reached saturation. The next most critical issue is at the system level. ”

What the SoC designers do

As Bittlestone suggests, the approach taken by SoC power management techniques has been increasing. This includes some very common methods that are transparent to anything other than the die. However, there are also methods that require the active participation of other parts of the system, and some have an important impact on external circuits.

There are several gate-level power management methods that are applied to the IC design flow and are transparent to system designers. For example, for a cell-based design tool—at least one FPGA brand—you can choose between a high-speed cell with a large leak and a low-leakage current slow cell. The synthesis tool analyzes the logic, inserts a clock logic gate, and turns off the clock of any register so that no significant data changes are visible during its duty cycle. This type of approach significantly reduces power consumption and does not require any input from the rest of the system, nor does it have any impact on performance.

Other methods require a lot of help from system management hardware or software. An example is Dynamic Voltage Frequency Adjustment (DVFS). In DVFS, the software estimates the best performance a module needs in a mode. The software guidance module, usually the CPU or accelerator, runs at a sufficient clock frequency to meet system requirements, and the voltage just meets the frequency requirement. A more rigorous approach to the same principle is module-level power gating. In this example, the software determines that no modules are currently needed to power down the module.

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