The Power Of Power
One of the big changes under way across the electronics industry these days is an understanding that power has to be dealt with at every possible turn and with every possible technology.
The semiconductor piece of the equation is probably the best understood. Power islands may be difficult to create and verify, but at least the solution is well known even if it’s complicated. An SoC with 20 power islands, power gating, efficient embedded software and right-sized real-time operating systems and applications can add enormous efficiency into a device.
That’s not enough, though, and other parts of the supply chain are finally beginning to recognize it. Battery technology has been stalled, but there have been huge gains in generating energy for devices from motion. Tire-monitoring systems, for example, are being developed that harvest energy from road vibration—which is an almost endless source of power while an automobile is running. The same type of energy harvesting can easily be applied to cell phones, motor control and sensor networks.
Software also can be developed that more efficiently uses the hardware beneath it, rather than simply running off general-purpose interfaces linked to other general-purpose interfaces. The goal in software is rapidly shifting toward specific code for specific purposes with only as much power as needed for a specific function.
All of this has a bearing on the SoC and FPGA design world, however. This revolution is something akin to Copernicus showing the Earth revolving around the sun instead of the other way around. While the chip will still dictate much of what goes on around the device—or at least the interaction of multiple chips on a board—designs now need to look beyond the boundaries of just the chip and at least be aware of what’s happening across the device.
Power is a global issue for a cell phone or a car or a server. That means every design within those devices or vehicles has to be power-aware on a global basis, and it means every engineer working on those projects has to look much further afield than in the past. The days of focusing just on a block or a subsystem are over. Power has changed the equation, and in the future it will have a huge impact not only on the designs but the way companies and engineering teams within those companies approach problems—and each other.
–Ed Sperling
Tags: low-power engineering