April 20, 2012 -- Power is a daunting challenge for modern system-on-chip (SOC) designs, from both the power-consumption and power-integrity perspectives. Achieving low power, from mobile and wireless designs to consumer devices to high-performance networking and computing applications that face power supply and cooling limitations, is now critical to design success.At the same time, rising complexity and chip-level power-management techniques make power-integrity analysis from chip-to-package-to-system essential. Designing for low power and power integrity is not automatic; there is no "low-power" button.

This article describes a holistic design for power methodology that spans from architectural decisions through front-end design to physical implementation and sign-off.

By William Ruby. (Ruby is the Senior Director of Product Engineering for RTL Power products at Apache Design Solutions, Inc.)