Stream Processors Reduces Power with Sequence Design's PowerTheater

Posted by EDA Geek News Staff in EDA Tools on Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The provider of the world's most powerful Digital Signal Processor (DSP) platform, Stream Processors Inc. (SPI) chose Sequence Design's PowerTheater for early power management and low-power architecture evaluation for their new processor design, reducing power 20-50%.

"Based on SPI's revolutionary Stream Processor(TM) architecture, our current Storm-1 family delivers the industry's lowest Watt per GOPS (Giga Operations Per Second), and PowerTheater has enabled us to further reduce power by slashing analysis iteration cycle times by 3-4X while the sophisticated tools suite provided comprehensive feedback," said Paul Filanowski, SPI's Vice President of Hardware Engineering. "Low power reduces package cost, allows us to meet stringent customer requirements and extend our market frontier into cost and power-sensitive markets that used to be dependent on custom, non-programmable, ASICs."

SPI's design team used a variety of PowerTheater power management capabilities including clock gating and data gating optimizations, multi-Vt libraries and automated Wattbots. Stimulus and modal operation is also a critical part of understanding power consumption. Since SPI's product is a software programmable processor, block-level regression power testing at both typical-case and worst-case conditions was an important part of the SPI design methodology.

Positive power management in SPI's DSP platforms translates to market competitiveness; accelerated time to market, reduced costs of IC packaging and ultimate end product; improved yield and reliability; and ultimately success in the marketplace for Stream Processors, and its customers.

About Stream Processors, Inc.
Stream Processors, Inc. (SPI) is a privately held fabless semiconductor company delivering an innovative stream processing architecture that helps consumer and industrial companies accelerate product development cycles and dramatically reduce system development costs. SPI was founded in 2004 to address the new era of compute-intensive applications requiring radically increased levels of processor performance and power efficiency. The company's technology and products improve application productivity by making parallel processing easier to program and use.

About Sequence Design
Sequence Design accelerates the ability of SoC designers to bring high-performance, power-aware ICs quickly to market. Sequence Design-For-Power solutions give customers the competitive advantage necessary to excel in aggressive technology markets.

If you found this page useful, bookmark and share it on:

Possibly of Interest

 
EDA Geek Newsletter
Don't have time to visit EDA Geek everyday? Then sign up for our free newsletter. We'll send you an email when we have something to share with you. Your email address will be kept confidential and we will not share, sell, or rent it to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking a link in the email.

Enter your email address to sign up for our free newsletter:   

If you are familiar with RSS feeds, you can also sign up for our free news feed. Our RSS feed is updated in real-time while our newsletter is updated daily.