Guidelines to identify your optimal power management solution depending on your application challenges

Grenoble, France – March 16, 2015 - The recent availability of easy-to-use “Power Island Construction Kits”, giving a new degree of freedom, together with the choice of a small number of “Interfaces for the Distribution of Power”, enables SoC integrators to select their performance trade-offs at system level instead of benchmarking individual voltage regulators.

Thanks to the DELTA standard, Dolphin Integration’s Reusable Power Kit Library (RPKL) gives SoC integrators the benefit of voltage regulators optimized for low power, high efficiency, low BoM, or low noise.

Obviously, numerous “Power Management Networks” (PMNet) may be proposed by combining Clock domains, Voltage Islands, Power Islands and regulation components diversified by performance criteria.

For identifying the optimal PMNet architecture, Dolphin Integration has launched the role of “Integration and Application Engineers” able to propose a custom Figure-of-Merit (FoM) based on customer’s specific application criteria and challenges, in the spirit of a Cooperative Selection process.

The FoM is a function assigning weights to various parameters in order to optimize a mix of performances, for selecting the best PMNet architecture for specific application requirements. The SoC integrator then only needs to choose the performance trade-offs between area, Bill-of-Material (BoM), pin count, leakage, dynamic consumption…

Here is an example of such guidelines used to reach the best SoC performance trade-off for the challenges of Internet of Things (IoT). Several PMNet implementations have been assessed by the SoC integrator, according to the power consumption challenge, and also with respect to area and BoM:

Thanks to the FoM, discrimination between the different solutions is straightforward. The FoM demonstrates that the solutions based on DELTA obtain the best results compared to the customer’s initial request. Above all, the FoM indicates that the best performance trade-off between these solutions is the synopsis 2a, which achieves the minimum score.

To increase the benefits for low power performances, the DELTA library of voltage regulators is naturally compatible with Dolphin Integration’s offering for island construction.

For more information contact the Product Marketing Manager at regulators@dolphin.fr

About Dolphin Integration

Dolphin Integration contributes to "enabling mixed signal Systems-on-Chip" for worldwide customers - up to the major actors of the semiconductor industry - with Silicon IP components best at low-power consumption.

This wide offering is based on innovative libraries of standard cells, register files, memory generators and power regulators. Complete networks for power supply can be flexibly assembled together with their loads: from high-resolution converters for audio and measurement applications to power-optimized micro-controllers of 8 or 16 and 32 bits.

Over 30 years of diverse experiences in the integration of silicon IP components and providing services for ASIC/SoC design and fabrication, with its own EDA solutions solving unaddressed challenges, make Dolphin Integration a genuine one-stop shop covering all customers’ needs for specific requests.

The company striving to incessantly innovate for its customers’ success has led to two strong differentiators:

• · state-of-the-art “configured subsystems” for high-performance applications securing the most competitive SoC architectural solutions,
• · a team of Integration and Application Engineers supporting each user’s need for optimal application schematics, demonstrated through EDA solutions enabling early performance assessments

Its social responsibility has been from the start focused on the design of integrated circuits with low-power consumption, placing the company in the best position to now contribute to new applications for general power savings through the emergence of the Internet of Things.