EDA's low-power play
By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- EDN, December 1, 2006
As chip designs move to 90 and 65 nanometers, manufacturers are faced with a new set of challenges, including temperature and variability issues for standby or active power.
The industry is trying to deal with these effects in several ways. One of the efforts is the Power Forward Initiative (PFI), spearheaded by EDA market leader Cadence Design Systems and furthered by the Unified Power Format (UPF) work of the Accellera industry standards body.
PFI made a big splash at this year's Design Automation Conference in July, unveiling its road map for a common power format (CPF). In October the Low-Power Coalition (LPC) was formed by the Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) industry consortium.
Just one day following the announcement regarding the LPC, Cadence turned the CPF standardization work over to Si2, following what appears to be pressure from the efforts of other low-power standardization entities.
Now Si2 says it will join the IEEE-SA as a corporate member and, once a CPF Working Group (WG) has been approved by the IEEE, will serve as secretary of the IEEE CPF WG to allow closer synchronization with its LPC. As part of this, the CPF will be made available to LPC members for their review, although it is not clear whether they will have a say in any changes or updates.
Membership in the LPC is open to all members of Si2, which currently includes 108 companies, whereas Cadence selected the PFI members.
Steve Schultz, president and CEO of Si2, says the CPF has excellent potential to serve a foundation role in low-power design flows. Pankaj Mayor, group director for industry alliances at Cadence, says, "Cadence fully supports having a single power format, and all the feedback we are getting from the industry is that the CPF meets all of the user needs."
The goal of forging a stronger connection with Si2 and LPC is to be more inclusive and make the CPF available to a larger cross-section of the industry so it can be seen ahead of the standards process, Mayor explains.
Even with all this time and effort by EDA vendors, is this what designers really need?
Michael Kaskowitz, senior vice president at semiconductor IP provider Mosaid Technologies, cautions that the EDA providers are trying to fight physics. Because of that, their work may be in vain—it is really up to the IP providers to create technologies to handle low-power issues.
Kaskowitz says Mosaid has seen substantial interest from customers who are willing to make an architectural change to solve power problems. "There is a lot of angst about power, but can it be solved in a standards body? There are certain problems that can be solved in standards bodies and others that probably can't because of proprietary technology that nobody wants to share," Kaskowitz says.
Further, he believes that the current standards work by EDA providers will be limited, given that the issues will be solved by the IP providers. "I don't think a standards body and the EDA vendors are going to be able to solve them. They're process issues, so they have to be solved by the IP providers and the foundries through the technology," Kaskowitz says.
In essence, he believes, the whole issue of dealing with power in designs is being handled by the wrong industry players.
"At the high level, I don't understand how EDA companies can solve the problems that are physical in nature. Mosaid has solved them through unique design approaches, and the foundries are solving them through process variation. It makes sense for those groups to address low power. There might be things from an EDA tools standpoint to give you measurement or simulation, but they don't solve the problem of power," he continues.
"Companies are going to have proprietary solutions that address power, and customers are going to decide. It's all going to be patented or trademarked; it's not going to be done in a standards body environment," he says.
Kaskowitz joined Mosaid after serving as president of the VSI Alliance semiconductor IP standards body and general manager of the IP and embedded software divisions of Mentor Graphics.
"The ugly secret of a lot of standards work is that if it doesn't pass the 'smell test' to outside people, it is probably being done for political reasons. A lot of the standards efforts that are forming in our industry, especially those driven by the EDA companies, are political and marketing-driven," he says.
"The real solutions are going to come from customers and IP providers, because saving power requires special techniques. There are ways to save power, but you can't just expect to take what you did two years ago and tweak it. It requires an architectural shift," Kaskowitz concludes.
