CHIPS 2020

Design teams find themselves facing decreasing power budgets while simultaneously the products that they design continue to require the integration of increasingly complex levels of functionality. The market place (driven by consumer preferences) and new regulations and guidelines on energy efficiency and environ- mental impact are the key drivers. This in turn has generated new approaches in all IC and electronic system design domains from the architecture to the physical layout of ICs, to design-for-test, as well as for design verification to insure that the design implementation actually meets the intended requirements and specifications.
This chapter covers key aspects of these forces from a technological and market perspective that are driving designers to produce more energy-efficient products. Observations by significant industry leaders from AMD, ARM, IBM, Intel, nVidia and TSMC are cited, and the emerging techniques and technologies used to address these issues now and into the future are explored.
Topic areas include:
– System level: Architectural analysis and transaction-level modeling. How architectural decisions can dramatically reduce the design power and the importance of modeling hardware and software together.
– IC (Chip) level: The impact of creating on-chip power domains for selectively
turning power off and/or multi-voltage operation on: (1) chip verification, (2) multi-corner multi-mode analysis during placement and routing of logic cells and (3) changes to design-for-test, all in order to accommodate for power-gating and multi-voltage control logic, retention registers, isolation cells and level shifters needed to implement these power saving techniques.
– Process level: The disappearing impact of body-bias techniques on leakage control and why new approaches like High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) technology help but don’t eliminate power issues.
Power-efficient design is impacting the way chip designers work today, and this chapter focuses on where the most significant gains can be realized and why power- efficiency requirements will continue to challenge designers into the future. Despite new process technologies, the future will continue to rely on innovative design approaches.