IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2017 - 27

Digital Circuits for
Mobile Computing
IMAGE LICENSED BY INGRAM PUBLISHING

Optimizing power performance
and innovation opportunities

Alice Wang and Hugh Mair

T

oday's mobile phone
has millions of times
more computing po-
wer than all of the
NASA computers that
put two astronauts on the moon. It is
through the progress made by Moore's
law and the ability of software engi-
neers to take advantage of increased
computing to create new applications
that help our daily life be more effi-
cient. There is enough computational
power available that we are at the prec-
ipice of intelligent robots, autonomous
vehicles, and machine learning for a
smart home/environment/life.
Putting all of this computing into
an increasingly smaller form fac-
tor and limited energy sources cre-
ates innovation opportunity for our

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2017.2745819
Date of publication: 16 November 2017

1943-0582/17©2017IEEE

industry. We can clock processors at
5+ GHz but cannot use them because
of the thermal limits of users putting
the device in their pockets. We can
drive more performance through
multicore and parallelism but the
user prefers to charge their mobile
once per day. To ship millions of ICs
per day means adding margin for reli-
ability, resulting in wasting power
and performance. New innovation is
needed to provide the optimized power
and performance of these devices.
This tutorial will discuss circuit
innovation opportunities for mobile
computing by being adaptive to the
environment, driving the state of the
art in power delivery and clocking and
then focusing on foundation intellec-
tual property (IP) such as standard cell
library and embedded memory design
for mobile computing. Finally, we will
look into how to co-optimize up the
food chain from circuits to systems

and beyond for the best solution in
mobile computing.

What's Going on Around Me?
(Adaptive Techniques for
Power/Performance Optimization)
On a given wafer there is a large varia-
tion of maximum central processing
unit (CPU) speed for each IC due to
process variations. However, at the
product level, we need to guarantee a
minimum CPU speed with which each
IC will work over all possible tem-
peratures and variations due to the
environment that the processor could
encounter. In the design closure stage,
we will sign off at the worst condition
of silicon speed, voltage, temperature,
and device lifetime, but in reality
this is also the worst case and causes
power overhead to achieve the speed
target. Therefore, by employing adap-
tive techniques, we can reduce this
power overhead by operating the IC

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

FA L L 2 0 17

27



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2017

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