The Texas Instruments MSP430 is practically synonymous with low-power processors and, although the company may not care much for the idea of clones of the architecture appearing, that is being helped by a crop of research processors that explore the limits of the threshold voltage of CMOS transistors. These…
Yoichi Yano, executive vice president of Renesas Electronics made energy saving the theme of his keynote at this week’s International Solid State Circuits Conference, describing some of the techniques the company is putting into action to make silicon suitable for self-powered sensor nodes.
Yano pointed out there is…
The International Solid State Circuits Conference kicks off next week and Texas Instruments, which unveiled a low-energy digital signal processor last year based on near-threshold logic circuitry, is keen to tout its involvement in more low-power work this year.
“Across our innovative semiconductor product portfolio, TI is…
Magnetic memory (MRAM) was not at my list of candidates for future cache memories but in a paper for the latest issue of IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, a group of engineers from Xi’an Jiaotong University make the case for using the memory to replace SRAM in level-one…
When looking at new architectures for low-power operation, it is easy to get fixated on one part of the design and ignore the ramifications for the rest of the system. The consequences of that are demonstrated in a paper that was presented at last year’s International Symposium on…
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are notorious for high power consumption. They are hard to power down in the same way as custom logic – so they have considerable static power consumption – and they use a lot more gates to achieve the same job with their greater flexibility. However, a good…
In an opinion piece for Electronics Weekly, head of Nujira Tim Haynes writes that the launch of LTE has met with some power problems. As such, it has not been all that different to that of 3G some ten years. Then as now, power was a major concern as handset…
Earlier this year, Abhishek Mahajan and Sorabh Sachdeva of Freescale Semiconductor wrote about the problems caused by temperature inversion in high-Vt cells, a situation where the usual assumptions about heat slowing circuits down fall down. It’s time to revisit the subject.
They have joined two other engineers from…