1. Bringing More Performance in Less Power TM Sergey Sofer Freescale Semiconductor Israel Ltd. May 4, 2011 Freescale and the Freescale logo are trademarks of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © 2011 Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

2. Outline IC Power consumption – background MSC8157 brief overview State of the art power saving techniques description and their applications to MSC8157. Architecture – enabled power saving techniques. Design– enabled power saving techniques. Manufacturing technology and assembly – enabled power saving techniques. Summary

3. Power consumption - general Integrated Circuit (IC) device power consumption is defined as amount of energy, supplied by an external power supply to the device in pre-defined time period. We distinguish peak, maximum, typical application average and stand-by power consumption. Peak power consumption defines external power supply capability including bulk/decoupling capacitors influence. Maximum power consumption defines system thermal requirements and usually given for a time period, equal to or bigger than the system thermal reactance. Average power consumption stands to define system requirement for typical application. Stand-by power consumption describes system power consumption in stand-by/idle mode. Power consumption reduction became important to Modern Ultra Large Scale Integration (ULSI) products. Design teams fight for lower power consumption during all design stages.

4. IC Power consumption partitioning Power consumption comprises dynamic and static parts. Static power consumption is defined by IC active devices leakage and short circuit currents: Leakage is mainly caused by MOSFET devices sub-threshold and gate current. Short circuit current is characteristic to biased circuits, pull-up or pull-down devices and some terminated circuits. Static power consumption greatly depends on the power supply voltage VDDand temperature T. Dynamic power consumption is mainly set by active devises switching. Dynamic power consumption depends on the power supply voltage VDD and average system/device clock frequency F. P = f(VDD3,T) P = f(VDD2,F)

5. MSC8157 – Overview Freescale’s MSC8157 multi core baseband DSP is one of the most powerful devices available in the market. It includes six SC3850 DSP cores at 1GHz, powerful MAPLE2 baseband accelerator, 3MB of L2 cache, 3MB of the shared memory, Serial-RapidIO, CPRI, PCI-express interfaces, supporting various communication protocols and security engine. The device is manufactured in 45nm technology. Freescale and the Freescale logo are trademarks of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © 2011 Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

6. Power saving techniques State of the art power saving techniques include the following: Low power modes; Power supply separation; Active Power Shut-off; Active Clock gating; Multi-Voltage approach; Multi-Frequency approach; Multi-threshold CMOS design; MSC8157 make use of various power saving techniques, including architectural, design and manufacturing technology enabled – almost all known state of the art solutions, mentioned above.

7. Low power modes (LPM) Block functioning profile Powerconsumption Full utilization Low utilization Not in use High utilization Low Power Mode (LPM) is a mean of purposeful and environmental operation of a functional unit to achieve its lowest possible power consumption. LPM should be aligned with the purposeful utilization of the functional unit (block). Proper LPM definition allows best power consumption reduction. Improper LPM definition may cause opposite result and affects IC functionality and performance.

8. Low power modes (cont’d) Block functioning profile Powerconsumption Full utilization Low utilization Not in use High utilization Full utilization of the functional unit requires all its resources available, so no LPM can be applied. The functional unit design is usually targeted to this operating mode.

9. Low power modes (cont’d) Block functioning profile Powerconsumption Full utilization Low utilization Not in use High utilization High utilization allows some functional or environmental relaxation to save either dynamic or static power or both: Some voltage reduction saves both dynamic and static power; Frequency decrease or stopping some clocking signals saves dynamic power.

10. Low power modes (cont’d) Block functioning profile Powerconsumption Full utilization Low utilization Not in use High utilization Low utilization allows variety of low power modes to be applied to the block. Voltage reduction saves both dynamic and static power; Frequency decrease or alternatively disabling part of the clock signals toggling saves dynamic power; Power gating may be extensively used and greatly saves static power.

11. Low power modes (cont’d) Block functioning profile Powerconsumption Full utilization Low utilization Not in use High utilization When the block is not in use its physical disconnection from the power supply provides maximal leakage power saving. Physically disconnected blocks are not available for potential use. Alternatively on-die power gating also provides significant leakage power saving. This can allow the block usage in the future.

12. MSC8157 Low Power Modes MSC8157 employs rich set of low power modes, allowing power consumption optimization according to the use-case. Doze mode Stops internal clocks and can be recovered by software without resetting the block or the device. Deep sleep Mode Stops the source of the clocks and can be recovered by hardware reset (block dependent). Power Down Mode (Full or Partial) Disables the power supply of some separated power domains (partial power down) or all power domains (full power down) and can be recovered by power up sequence of the power domain(s) that was powered down. Freescale and the Freescale logo are trademarks of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © 2011 Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

13. Active Power Shut-off (PSO) VDDC VDDC Switch Control Continuous supply Continuous supply VDD gated Gated supply Gated Power Domain Continuous Power Domain GND GND On-die power gating (PG) or Power Shutoff (PSO) technique is used for leakage power reduction in VLSI devices Characterized by disconnection of part(s) of a functional unit or the entire unit from the continuous power supply network Used when the unit’s operation is not required. The disconnection is provided by a switch, placed in power supply current path and controlled from another functional unit. PSO blocks when powered up, must start from the reset state.

14. Recovery from a PSO state LPM enable 7 1 5 3 2 6 4 Time Short LPM period tpower-up Vgated supply Time Supply voltage recovery at the PSO exit takes time (dozens to hundreds of system clock periods). This is in order to keep low noise on the continuous or keep-alive power supply part (which provides the power supply voltage to devices that should remain powered on, e.g. data retaining devices, PSO controls etc). The consequence of that is the reduction in the PSO method efficiency, especially for short Low Power Mode (LPM) periods (like periods ## 2, 6).

15. MSC8157 Active Power Shut-off Active power shut-off (PSO) technique is used in MSC8157 to reduce the static power dissipation in “calm” periods for several functional units, which power consumption profile fits this feature. On/off switching is performed automatically by hardware – no application/user intervention required Special (patent pending) fast power up/down sequence allows minimal impact on performance. Freescale and the Freescale logo are trademarks of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © 2011 Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

17. Clock network toggling provides more than 50% of the dynamic power consumption of a typical VLSI circuit.

19. Global Clock disabling Global clock gating EN_A Unit A CKG_A Clock source disabling EN_Z Unit Z EN CKG_Z Clocksource CKG CK Global clock disabling allows saving of the chip clock distribution network power. All chip units are disabled. Reset is usually required to recover from the global clock gating. Global clock source disabling (e.g. PLL stop) is the most efficient power saving way not employing power supply voltage manipulation. Reset is required to recover from the clock shut down. Recovery time is usually long.

20. MSC8157 - Active clock gating MSC8157 low power modes employ massive usage of active clock gating. Clock source shut-down – deep sleep mode. Global clock shut-down – doze mode. Local clock shut-down – functional mode. Clock gating operation is implemented in the design and transparent to user. Global clocks gating is applied by LPM activation. Local clock gating is implemented during the design stage and is embedded in the functional unit hardware Freescale and the Freescale logo are trademarks of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © 2011 Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

21. Power distribution network partitioning VDD1 VDD2 Power Domain1 Power Domain2 P = f(VDD2,F) Die GND GND Power distribution network partitioning or power supply separation is a technique, used to provide different voltages to different parts of the IC. Static power saving for IC parts which are not in use for specific application. Power saving for IC parts which operation is possible at lower voltage. Power distribution network partitioning impacts global power distribution system quality. It should be avoided if not required. Exaggerated power distribution network partitioning requirement and improper use may bring to opposite results.

23. Manufacturing technology and environmental conditions (like “Faster” manufacturing process corner or lower temperature).

24. Functional conditions (like LPM: “power down”, “deep sleep”, “doze” etc.)

25. Functional constraints (application demand).

26. The disadvantage of DVS is that transition between different voltages takes time:

31. the performance is maintained since low threshold transistors are used in the critical signal path(s). Both high performance and low power are achieved simultaneously. Multi-threshold technique is good for leakage power reduction during both standby and active modes without performance and die area penalty.

32. MSC8157 MTCMOS approach MSC8157 SoC use 45nm technology providing different levels of MOSFET threshold voltage from the lowest to the highest to find proper balance between the performance requirement and the maximal leakage power saving. This set allows saving most of the leakage power. Freescale and the Freescale logo are trademarks of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © 2011 Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

33. Power Saving in VLSI - Summary Defined IC Power consumption, including its parts and its influencing operational and environmental factors. Overviewed Architecture – enabled power saving techniques: Low power modes definition, Active Power shut-off (PSO) and Active Clock disable function. Outlined Design– enabled power saving techniques: Multi-Voltage and Multi-Frequency operation. Discussed Manufacturing technology – enabled power saving technique - Multi-threshold CMOS approach.

34. MSC8157 low power features - Summary Power consumption reduction is one of the primary targets of DSP design along with high performance and feature set enrichment. MSC8157 make use of almost all state of the art power consumption reduction techniques, allowing to achieve dozens of percents of the power consumption reduction while not compromising with performance and features set. Most of the low power solutions are hardware and transparent to user. Those which require user involvement are well documented and supported by the development tools. Freescale and the Freescale logo are trademarks of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © 2011 Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

35. 30 TM Thank you for attention! Freescale and the Freescale logo are trademarks of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © 2011 Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.