Digital Systems must maintain a Thermal Design Power (TDP) requirement per chip, else chip reliability may be drastically reduced, ultimately resulting in a failure? Currently, the TDP requirement can be maintained, if heat energy can be removed faster than power, energy is added. Vapor Chamber: (1) Vapor Chamber is a heat accumulator, exchanger that limits the maximum temperature based […]

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Power management can be either centralized, distributed, or a combination of both.  The type of devices supported by a power manager chip, or integrated into a system-on-chip presents different power management alternatives.  If the devices, such as memory chips, are homogenous; then a centralized power manager function becomes more attractive for a number of reasons: (1) Same […]

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Prior blog on peak and average power highlights benefits of reordering device activity to increase Digital System reliability.  This blog carries this concept one step further by accumulating task or thread requests to avoid leaving memory in Active state (full power) spread out over time. The type of task or thread determines if this is feasible. […]

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Peak power for a Power Manager or power domain, is an indication that several devices are in the Active (full power) state at the same time, such that the peak, or instantaneous power is at a Maximum. In a clocked system, this may indicate that several devices are active at the same time for a particular […]

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A few years ago, engineers in the automotive industry worked on improving the mechanical performance of clutch transmissions, exhaust systems and adding a turbocharger. Due to low data rates, CAN and CAN-FD functioned well for these applications. Today every vehicle shipped has an average of about 60 – 100 complex sensors, higher in the case […]

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