The Holy Grail of Holistic Low-Power Design

Abstract

The power density has been steadily increasing with technology scaling, while die sizes have not shrunk accordingly due to cost reasons. The combination of these two trends has resulted in a constant increase in power consumption for integrated circuits. This situation further worsens when we also look at the application from its power/performance requirements point of view. Most of the products, that consumers want, already have hard power budgets as either the final device is expected to run on batteries for weeks or due to the increasing cost of energy. These trends lead to power as our primary foe along the path dictated by Moore’s law.