Open-Silicon Awarded Patent for Low Power ASIC Design Methodology
14-Sep-2011
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MILPITAS, Calif. - Open-Silicon Inc., a leading SoC design and semiconductor manufacturing company, announced in a press release that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued US Patent 7,941,776 related to Open-Silicon’s PowerMAX technology. Low power SoC design is a key differentiator for not just mobile applications, but also many networking, telecom, storage, and computing solutions. This new Open-Silicon patent focuses on lowering SoC dynamic and standby power by enriching the target standard library to best fit the needs of a particular design.
Specifically, this patent encompasses the intellectual property rights of Open-Silicon’s ZenCells™, standard cells created on-the-fly using PowerMAX’s design-specific library augmentation. ZenCells drive down both dynamic and leakage power through a method of closed-loop IC design optimization via the creation of design-specific cells from post-layout patterns. This optimization process involves automatically creating design-specific cells with desired characteristics, such as power, performance, or noise, which are then implemented as a standard cell from a set of post layout patterns. The pattern represents a part of or a whole standard cell and contains information regarding the pattern, such as layout, timing area, power and noise. Because these cells are created from post-layout patterns, the risks of prior dynamic library techniques are easily avoided. The result is cells that are optimized to satisfy the constraints imposed by the design context, thus bringing powerful design-specific customization to standard cell-based design methodology.
Introduced in 2008, PowerMAX is part of Open-Silicon’s Max Technologies product line – a result of extensive R&D to create a series of products that allow customers to take their designs to a level beyond what the latest EDA tools offer. Based on a strong foundation of conventional techniques, PowerMAX adds design-specific library augmentation, back biasing, power recovery and custom leakage signoff, resulting in the ASIC industry’s most complete low power design offering. The total Open-Silicon PowerMAX offering includes both the conventional techniques and the new technologies. By combining the best industry standard methods with novel technologies unique to Open-Silicon, customers can achieve the lowest power consumption possible for their silicon.
“Increasing levels of integration in performance-driven SoCs have challenged designers to come up with novel architectural and physical design solutions for power density limitations. At the other end of the spectrum, mobile applications are driving exponential growth in mobile performance, matched with every-increasing battery life requirements,” said Colin Baldwin, director of marketing for Open-Silicon. “Open-Silicon identified this growing problem early on and developed the MAX technologies to solve it. The award of this patent underscores Open-Silicon’s commitment to low power technology, and the company’s ability to provide its customers with better custom silicon.”
Open-Silicon is a leading semiconductor company focused on SoC realization for traditional ASIC, develop-to-spec, and derivative ICs. In support of the industry trend towards collaborative engineering and design-lite, Open-Silicon offers SoC architecture, system design, physical design, low-level software, and high-quality semiconductor manufacturing services with one of the world’s broadest partner ecosystems for IC development.