Low Power - "Going green"

The "going green" thought is vogue in every industry,it goes from recycling paper,recycling batteries,recycling printer catridges...and many .. and finally thus bother the semiconductor industry as alot for it's contribution for the power consumption in most of the house hold and office appliances we use. Take for example our own TV sets at home , that has it's small red LED glowing, indicating the phantom power consumption in the device,even after you "power off" the system using your remote.The same goes into our standby mode of the PC.

Now, while we start dissecting deep down into each of these various devices,we then find the power consumption of each chip that gets collectively embedded into the whole device ,responsible for the phantom power of the device. It's here that we need to look that every chip that forms this device needs to have a control on the amount of power consumbed.

With the rapid progress in semiconductor technology from 130nm to 90nm to 65nm and then next to 45 nm, the chip density is increasing driving an increase in performance and has further increased the frequencies higher at the cost of power dissipation on chip (SoC) design. This penalty is making the power consumption in battery-operated portable devices a major concern as the battery life of the device is affected . The goal of low-power design for battery-powered devices is thus to extend the battery service life while meeting performance requirements.
This move for low power is a design goal not just for the portable devices ,even for non-portable devices since excessive power dissipation in these devices can result in increased packaging and cooling costs.

To combat this problem, designers are using aggressive approaches at every step of the design process, from software to architecture to implementation.

Thus, entering the blog with this introduction, we would share the various techniques that are used and can be used for conserving power in a complex SOC designs , based on few percepts of the various seminars we've attended.