Learn more about Voltage Monitor IP core
Based on the assertions approach, this paper presents an innovative methodology for the verification of analog and mixed-signal circuits which embeds detectors at each step of the hierarchical verification process to increase Quality Control and reduce Time to Market. This paper illustrates the approach with the input range and phase shift verification of the Analog Front-End (AFE) of an Energy Meter.
The free lunch offered for decades by Moore’s law is now over and scaling down to the next technology node no longer offers the required energy efficiency gains. Design teams must now pursue their gains by deploying increasingly complex power management techniques to meet the demands of the new IoT markets.
This Position Paper describes a family of Power Management IP solutions integrated by Dolphin Integration’s customers into their SoC to drastically improve Energy Efficiency (EE). SoC performance metric is changing, moving from pure performance metric (GHz or MIPS) to performance efficiency and minimum power consumption. This new metric, already crucial for IoT or mobile devices, is becoming key in various applications, like automotive, embedded or space.
Allowing battery-powered devices to run, without battery recharge, for years rather than months, partakes in enhancing significantly end-user satisfaction and is a key point to enabling the emergence of IoT applications. Numerous applications, such as M2M, BLE, Zigbee…, have an activity rate (duty cycle) such that the power consumption in sleep mode dominates the overall current drawn by the SoC (System on Chip). For such applications, the design of the “Always-On power domain" (a.k.a AON power domain) is pivotal.
Based on the system specification of a typical smart meter, this article demonstrates the importance of carefully selecting the power metering IP solution so that its specification matches the standard requirements and copes with the application challenges. This article then pinpoints thoroughly the various issues that must be taken into account for the selection of the Silicon IP and helps identify the possible trade-offs between the performance of the Mixed-signal Front-end (MFE) and that of the Power and energy Computation Engine (PCE).
Inductor-based Switching Regulators (SR) have historically represented the preferred architecture for power supplies. Nowadays, for low-power and highly integrated electronic systems, embedded inductor-based SRs show several limitations that can be overcome by the use of inductorless SR architectures. This paper provides a qualitative and quantitative comparison between both types of SR in terms of implementation cost (Bill of Material, and pin count), and performance (efficiency, noise, and reliability).
