Dolphin Integration's innovative power island construction kit optimizes Low-Power Management

Grenoble, France – July 6th, 2015 -- A safe and flexible solution to build the most efficient power islands proves to be essential but challenging for all SoC designs to enable optimized Low-Power management.

To guarantee the safe construction of power islands for the lowest power consumption, Dolphin Integration proposes an innovative power island construction kit called CLICK, which includes a variety of low-power cells needed to implement a number of power management techniques, such as:

• Power gating techniques for all kinds of islands enable that some power islands in a SoC can be independently switched-off, when unused, in order to minimize power leakage during sleep mode. When using retention mode, power gating enables powering down without losing state and resuming operation with fast wake-up.
• Multi-voltage techniques are used to split a design into multiple voltage islands supplied at different voltage levels to save dynamic power consumption.

Enriched with the patented Transition Ramp Cell (TRC), inserted into the power ring of the island, SESAME CLICK is not only a solution guaranteeing safe power island construction, but also a low power and cost effective solution with flexible and safe control of the power-up sequence.

• Flexibility of in-rush current management
  • Limitation of in-rush current controlled by the TRC enables an implementation “correct-by-construction”
  • Easy adjustment of in-rush current and/or minimization of wake up time at implementation and runtime programmable through registers
• Ease of integration
  • Methodology for an automatic computation of the optimal number and size of power switches required for creating the island power ring
  • Script for automatic and optimized power ring insertion
  • Compatible with SCAN test ensuring no fabrication error
• Add-on to the SESAME uHD 6 track standard cell library, contributing to a less leaky and denser logic island domain thanks to our patented «retention spinner cell».
  • 3 times denser than standard 7T retention Flip-Flop
  • Up to 2 times less leaky than any contender

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For further information on the easy power islands construction with SESAME CLICK, click here to watch a presentation video or contact libraries@dolphin.fr.

About Dolphin Integration

Dolphin Integration contributes to "enabling mixed signal Systems-on-Chip" for worldwide customers - up to the major actors of the semiconductor industry - with Silicon IP components best at low-power consumption.

This wide offering is based on innovative libraries of standard cells, register files, memory generators and power regulators. Complete networks for power supply can be flexibly assembled together with their loads: from high-resolution converters for audio and measurement applications to power-optimized micro-controllers of 8 or 16 and 32 bits.

Over 30 years of diverse experiences in the integration of silicon IP components and providing services for ASIC/SoC design and fabrication, with its own EDA solutions solving unaddressed challenges, make Dolphin Integration a genuine one-stop shop covering all customers’ needs for specific requests.

The company striving to incessantly innovate for its customers’ success has led to two strong differentiators:

• state-of-the-art “configured subsystems” for high-performance applications securing the most competitive SoC architectural solutions,
• a team of Integration and Application Engineers supporting each user’s need for optimal application schematics, demonstrated through EDA solutions enabling early performance assessments

Its social responsibility has been from the start focused on the design of integrated circuits with low-power consumption, placing the company in the best position to now contribute to new applications for general power savings through the emergence of the Internet of Things.