Changing The Economics Of Design
It’s a known medical fact that f you can lower the temperature of the human body by one degree, chances are pretty good that a person will live an extra 10 years.
There are a number of studies to that effect, because not everyone’s body temperature is the same. Those whose body temperature is naturally lower tend to live longer and often better lives, assuming roughly the same environmental conditions. That doesn’t mean if you cool it down abnormally you’ll survive longer. You may work harder to maintain an optimal temperature and die earlier from the induced stress.
The same idea applies in electronics. If you can design a semiconductor with lower the voltage in a device it will last longer. The challenge comes in the design, though, and so far the semiconductor world hasn’t seen a whole lot of effort in power modeling with multiple power domains.
How important this is depends upon the application, and there’s a supreme bit of irony here. Typically designs where engineers are most likely to experiment with advanced ways of cutting power are the ones in the highest volume, namely consumer devices. And for the most part, no one expects those to last very long. A three-year lifespan for a smart phone is a long time. Most contracts only last two years.
Even automobile manufacturers only specify to battery makers that the batteries last as long as the lease period. They don’t want to have to change them out during that time. Beyond that, life expectancy on a car battery is questionable. It’s the same with brake light bulbs, if you’ve owned a car longer than a typical lease. If you’ve ever replaced one, you’ll notice the other one typically goes out within weeks of the first one.
So where is all this leading? First of all, low power designs are good for a lot of reasons. They save battery life, which is a convenience. What most vendors aren’t recognizing, though, is they also can last a lot longer—meaning that if you can compile the right kind of data you probably can sell the longevity factor and change the economics for the components.
The chip industry has a long history of giving away technology at the lowest possible cost with no premium for additional value. Lower-power designs are more complex, require more hours for verification and more engineering dollars to create. They require more third-party IP and more up-front design. And that should be worth something extra.
Moore’s Law is an economic equation based upon the price of transistors. There’s no reason that lower power has to mean lower cost when it adds longer life and better reliability. And there’s no reason that marketers can’t capitalize on this in a very big way.
–Ed Sperling
Tags: economics, low-power design
October 9th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Chip design with reduced power, reduction of scale, and new materials are spelling innovation in IC design. Data density is the research factor leading progress, with the atomic topological function the key feature of 3D EM full-wave imaging techniques. Recent development work has produced the picoyoctometric, 3D, interactive video atomic model imaging function, in terms of chronons and spacons for exact, quantized relativistic animation.
The atom’s RQT (relative quantum topological) data point imaging function is built by combination of the relativistic Einstein-Lorenz transform functions for time, mass, and energy with the workon quantized electromagnetic wave equations for frequency and wavelength. The atom labeled psi (Z) pulsates at the frequency {Nhu=e/h} by cycles of {e=m(c^2)} transformation of nuclear surface mass to forcons with joule values, followed by nuclear force absorption. This radiation process is limited only by spacetime boundaries of {Gravity-Time}, where gravity is the force binding space to psi, forming the GT integral atomic wavefunction. The expression is defined as the series expansion differential of nuclear output rates with quantum symmetry numbers assigned along the progression to give topology to the solutions.
Next, the correlation function for the manifold of internal heat capacity particle 3D functions is extracted by rearranging the total internal momentum function to the photon gain rule and integrating it for GT limits. This produces a series of 26 topological waveparticle functions of the five classes; {+Positron, Workon, Thermon, -Electromagneton, Magnemedon}, each the 3D data image of a type of energy intermedon of the 5/2 kT J internal energy cloud, accounting for all of them.
Those energy data values intersect the sizes of the fundamental physical constants: h, h-bar, delta, nuclear magneton, beta magneton, k (series). They quantize nuclear dynamics by acting as fulcrum particles. The result is the picoyoctometric, 3D, interactive video atomic model data point imaging function, responsive to keyboard input of virtual photon gain events by relativistic, quantized shifts of electron, force, and energy field states and positions.
Images of the h-bar magnetic energy waveparticle of ~175 picoyoctometers are available online at http://www.symmecon.com with the complete RQT atomic modeling guide titled The Crystalon Door, copyright TXu1-266-788. TCD conforms to the unopposed motion of disclosure in U.S. District (NM) Court of 04/02/2001 titled The Solution to the Equation of Schrodinger.