Green Chips in Newport Beach

Yesterday, I moderated a panel on green chip design in Newport Beach at the 7^th International SOC Conference. Chances are you didn’t see or hear any of it because there were only 100 people at this conference in total. That’s really too bad because we had a great set of panelists:

1. Michel Laurence co-founded Octasic, which is a Montreal specialist in echo cancellation and has mastered the art of self-clocking or self-timed (asynchronous) logic design.
2. Jauher Zaidi, CEO, PalmChip Corporation, which was in the chip-design business but has now spun off those activities to focus more on SOC platform software.
3. Alan Ruberg, SPMT architect for SPMT, The Serial Port Memory Technology consortium, which is developing a high-performance, low-power, next-generation memory interface to replace the DDR families with an interface that uses fewer pins.
4. Dr. Simiack Haghighi, Principal Architect of Qualcomm’s CDMA Technology Architecture Group, which should need no introduction…and
5. Steve Carlson, VP of Product Marketing at Cadence (who kindly volunteered from the audience at the last minute when a panelist from another leading EDA company didn’t show).

I tossed out questions from readers of my blogs, some I developed on my own, and some that came from the panelists themselves. This was a cynical question from one of my EDN Leibson’s Law blog readers: What’s the difference between the design of a Green Chip and one of those greyish Silicon ones?….More to my point - doesn’t Darwin take care of those companies who don’t design to a lower power solution than their competitors and, therefore, is this “Green Chip” thing just hopping aboard the Hype Bandwagon? Go here to read the  panelists’ answers.