Learn more about Power On Reset (POR) IP core
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.
Developing and verifying a control network in a low-power SoC is a challenging task, especially managing the different states of regulators and modes of power domains.
This article first describes state-of-the-art approaches to addressing this issue, and then delves into the solution promoted by Dolphin Integration to go further, thanks to the easy and secure Maestro� solution to manage SoC power mode transitions.
In mobile electronics, a single device suffices to cover various daily usages: calling, taking pictures, playing music, geolocating, etc… All of these common features should fit in one’s hand. To adequately implement these new functionalities, audio electronics must not be limited to basic plug and play functionalities any longer. Smartphone applications should be compliant with new user practices by enabling more interactivity and giving more possibilities to control the inner functionalities.
The memory hierarchy (including caches and main memory) can consume as much as 50% of an embedded system power. This power is very application dependent, and tuning caches for a given application is a good way to reduce power consumption. However application programs are complex and include many subroutines, each of them having their own optimal cache configuration. We developed a low power dynamically reconfigurable cache controller and its simulator called Cache Evaluation Software.
