Sub-Threshold Design - A Revolutionary Approach to Eliminating Power
Mike Salas, VP Marketing, Ambiq Micro
EDN (December 22, 2014)
Low energy consumption has replaced performance as the foremost challenge in electronic design. Performance is important, but it must now accede to the energy capacity of batteries and even the minimal output of energy harvesters. Performance at all costs no longer works; energy consumption is now the dominant requirement. While reducing energy consumption is critically important throughout the electronics industry, the question is: how should that goal be achieved? Ambiq Micro’s approach moves beyond the incremental improvements that other semiconductor companies have taken and makes revolutionary advances through a unique approach to the problem: sub-threshold circuit design.
Energy is consumed in two fundamental ways: as leakage, when a circuit’s state isn’t changing, and dynamically as internal nodes are charged up and down. For realistic circuits in operation, dynamic power dominates – especially for the higher power supply voltages used in most designs today.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Secure Boot Loader
- Memory Subsystem
- 4/8-bit mixed-precision NPU IP
- Compiler-centric single-core LPU
- SMC 2nm 1V8 ESD Power Clamp – Low Leakage
Related Articles
- Time-Domain Analog Design: Why and How
- Automotive Design Needs Efficient Verification to Survive
- VLSI Physical Design Methodology for ASIC Development with a Flavor of IP Hardening
- Optimizing Floorplan for STA and Timing improvement in VLSI Design Flow
Latest Articles
- Versat-AI: An ONNX-to-SoC Compiler for Model-Agnostic CGRA Edge Inference
- HyNoC: A Hybrid Circuit-Switch/Wormhole Network-on-Chip for Distributed VLIW Computing on FPGA
- Hybrid ASIC-FPAA Fabric for Performance Security Trade-off
- A Centralized Performance Monitoring Architecture for Heterogeneous Multicore SoCs
- A Low-Latency ASIC Architecture for Real-Time Line Segment Detection