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National, ARM team on iappliance, cellular powerBy Stephan Ohr
It comes at a time when several trends in the market are forcing IC developers to focus as much attention, if not more, on power management, as on performance: the trend toward system-on-chip designs in which the equivalent of a single board can be put on a single IC, advanced processor designs which requires increasing power to reach higher clock rates, and the new mainstream of computing in the embedded network infrastructure and in small footprint handheld and wireless personal communications and computing iappliances, where running out of battery power is an almost weekly if not daily occurance. Under the terms of the agreement, made just prior to Tuesday's (Nov. 12) Electronica Conference and Exhibition in Munich, Germany, National will develop a closed-loop system for monitoring and controlling the current consumed for ARM Ltd.'s processor cores. ARM, in turn, will make available National's power management system to licensees of its cores.
Deal worth millions Neither company would disclose the financial details of the relationship. ARM also would not put a price tag on the power management add-ons or identify the first products to offer them. But with ARM processor cores being used in roughly 90 percent of the 400 million cellular handsets produced worldwide each year, a per-unit royalty of just a few cents could make the deal worth many millions of dollars. While refusing to discuss the financial implications, National's vice president for portable power systems, Peter Henry, reiterated what he said propelled the two companies. "Energy conservation is as significant now as the expanding 'Internet bubble' seemed in 1996," he said. "People want to add more features to their handheld products - MP3 players, digital cameras and the like - but they want to have longer battery life." Both companies emphasized they were taking a "systems approach" to power management, one that included processor elements, operating systems and software - not just the usual voltage regulator components. ARM will equip National with a set of "intelligent energy managers" - tools that serve as dynamic performance monitors, said John Cornish, ARM's director of CPU programs. The tools will enable users to balance CPU loading for a given set of software tasks. Into the monitoring loop, National will plug its own "PowerWise" energy management tools and devices. Chief among them will be an adaptive power controller. "PowerWise technology will slave the power delivery system to the absolute minimum required to complete a given CPU task," Henry said. National (Santa Clara, Calif.) and ARM (Maidenhead, England), along with competitors and friends in the processor business - Intel Corp., presumably influenced by Analog Devices Inc., and Texas Instruments Inc., which also partners with ARM on the Omap development platform for handhelds - have made headway on a power-conservation technique called voltage scaling. Voltage scaling sets priorities for processor CPU tasks, scaling them according to their relative urgency, and adjusts the operating voltage and clock frequency according to that priority. Adaptive voltage scaling (AVS) will undoubtedly play a role here, Henry acknowledged. But the principals to this deal believe their power management activities will go further toward promoting an industry standard. For its part, ARM intends to embed its "Intelligent Energy Model" into the operating system for the processor and to promote it among ARM programmers. National's PowerWise Interface, meanwhile, which communicates energy-requirement parameters between the system-on-chip (SoC) incorporating an ARM and the power delivery components, will be made available in synthesizable and transportable HDL code. The interface, which takes about 3,000 gates, is technology independent, National said. A two-wire bus communicates with off-chip voltage regulators. In addition to providing its intellectual property to SoC vendors using the ARM cores, National will work toward incorporating PowerWise technology into third-party EDA tools and the design flows that incorporate them. This will encourage the proliferation of simulation models for semiconductor cells (at various voltage and clock levels) and the extraction of characterization data for specific fabrication processes. The first ARM cores to incorporate the ARM Intelligent Energy Manager, National's PowerWise AVS and open-loop voltage scaling, and National's PowerWise power management ICs are expected to appear in the second quarter of 2003. The companies will demonstrate ARM's Intelligent Energy Manager (for Linux) - something of a "proof of concept" for AVS - at Electronica this week. The companies expect test chips with AVS (and other PowerWise products) to be available at CeBIT next year.
Auto-world analogies National spokesmen have lately used auto-industry developments as an analogy for power-management activity. The focus on voltage regulator efficiency (converting 85 percent to 96 percent) is like tweaking the automobile's transmission and drive train: It provides small, incremental savings. But major energy savings will not be realized without a drastic overhaul of the entire engine and transmission - the architecture of the system. Henry said he hoped National's partnership with ARM can extend battery life in handhelds by 25 percent initially and by 400 percent long-term.
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