Fujitsu Licenses Transmeta Heat, Power Managment Tech
Online staff -- EDN, December 2, 2004
For use in its current and future generation semiconductor products, Fujitsu Limited has licensed Transmeta Corp.’s LongRun2 power management and transistor leakage control technologies, the companies said today.
NEC agreed to license the technology last year, and Transmeta has begun to see licensing revenues from the technology this year.
Transmeta’s technologies address the excessive chip heat and transistor leakage that pervade semiconductor design, expected to get increasingly worse as manufacturing technologies continue to scale to smaller dimensions.
Further, LongRun2 technologies are aimed at reducing total chip power, reducing standby power, reducing burn-in power, possibly improving chip performance and reducing manufacturing costs.
LongRun2 is based on Transmeta’s LongRun power management technology, which dynamically adjusts MHz and voltage hundreds of times per second to reduce power consumption. LongRun2 extends this approach by dynamically adjusting transistor threshold voltages to control transistor leakage to reduce leakage caused by changes in runtime conditions, such as voltage and temperature, which are not predetermined when the chip is manufactured.
Toshihiko Ono, group president of Fujitsu Limited’s electronic devices business group said in a statement, “By working closely together with Transmeta, we expect to combine the capabilities of our high performance technologies and their low-power expertise for the benefit of our ASIC, CPU and foundry customers.”
Initial production for Transmeta’s Efficeon TM8800 processors recently began on Fujitsu’s 90nm CMOS process technology in Tokyo. The first versions of the LongRun2-enhanced TM8800 are expected to sample later this year, to include further reductions in active and standby power.
