Industry mulls power-efficient e-design

Cadence Design Systems, has announced the formation of the 'power forward initiative' that is aimed at enabling the design and production of more power-efficient electronic devices.

Members of the initiative include AMD, ARM, ATI Technologies, Cadence, Freescale Semiconductor, Fujitsu, NEC and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

According to Cadence, the initiative will link design, verification and implementation to reduce risk and increase predictability in chip power reduction.

The members of the initiative will work to adopt a new automated design infrastructure aimed at reducing chip power consumption.

"To achieve its goal, the `power forward initiative' charter calls for, among other things, the refinement and promotion of a new open specification that captures essential design intent for power and links the design, implementation and verification domains," it said.

The group aims to begin the industry open standardisation process starting in 2007.

"Cadence believes that the greatest gains in developing low-power technology can be made at the architectural level, and we have already been investing in technologies that enable IP re-use and portability," said Mike Fister, president and CEO of Cadence in a statement.

By uniting industry leaders, the `power forward initiative' will steer the industry towards a broader, systematic and much more integrated approach to low power design, providing a platform to enable higher level exploration, he added.

According to Marty Seyer, senior vice president (commercial sector), AMD as microprocessor designs shrink and advance, power consumption is top of the mind in any new design.

"Increasing performance levels at the expense of increasing power consumption is unacceptable in the present and future processors," he said.

"We look forward to working through the `power forward initiative' to deploy new design automation approaches to reduce power effects on semiconductor device performance," he added.