cei@upm.

es

Power management for electronic

systems low power design

Pedro Alou (pedro.alou@upm.es )

Teresa Riesgo (teresa.riesgo@upm.es)
Universidad Politcnica de Madrid

Goals

W
Power
converter

Electronic
load

Power management of electronic systems

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Goals
Understand the importance of power consumption in electronic
systems
Learn how and why the circuits consume power

Low power design techniques (at design time, at run time)

Power sources for energy aware systems

Power converter design for low power consumption

Power management of electronic systems

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Outline of the course

Introduction

Structure of the subject

Evolution of power consumption in digital systems

Power consumption basics

How an electronic system consumes power CMOS technology

Challenges in technology scaling and in (low) power supplies

Optimizing power in digital systems

Low power design techniques at different levels (circuit, logic, RTL, system)
Optimizing power at run time

Power estimation

Dynamic and static techniques

Different abstraction levels

Power sources

Battery powered devices

Energy harvesting

Low power supplies and converters

Voltage regulators
Dynamic Voltage Scaling
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Activities

3 ECTS

~28 lecture hours (equivalent to 2 hours/week)

Lab sessions
Personal work up to ~75 hours of student effort

Assignments

Lab work (TBD)

Research work

Final evaluation

Based on all the activities + final exam

Power management of electronic systems

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Calendar
lectures
2/02

01/03

9/02

03/03

11/02

11/02

08/03

18/02

18/02

10/03

03/03

10/03

23/02
25/02

25/02

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Information comes from

and many scientific/technical papers

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Power management for electronic systems

low power design

cei@upm.es

1. Introduction

Universidad Politcnica de Madrid

Some history

Nobel
56

1947

transistor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLNh4UY5ohw

Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley

1958

Kilby

https://www.fairchildsemi.com/about/history-heritage/

Integrated circuit

Nobel
2000
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More history

microprocessors

Pentium II (1996) 10.000.000 trs.

Intel 4004 (1970) 1.500 trs.

nVIDIA GK110 (2012)
7.000.000.000 trs.

Intel Xeon-Phi (2012) 5.000.000.000 trs.

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Moores law
In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors per chip
would double every 18 months it is true!

Transistors (MT)

1000

2X growth in 1.96 years!

100
10

486

1
0.1

0.01

386
286
8086
8085
8080
8008
4004

0.001
1970

Microprocessors

P6
Pentium proc

1980

1990
Year

2000

2010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3IUVvJ2XgI
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Moores law

1 Billion
Transistors

K
1,000,000

100,000
Pentium
II
Pentium
III
Pentium Pro
Pentium
i486
i386
80286

10,000
1,000
100
10

8086
Source: Intel

1
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
Projected
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Moores law

Die size (mm2)

100

10
8080

8086
8085
8008
4004

386
286

P6
Pentium
proc
486

~7% growth per year

~2X growth in 10 years

1
1970

1980

1990
year

2000

2010

Die size growth

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Performance evolution
10000

Doubles every
2 years

freq (MHz)

1000
100

486
10

8085

1
0.1
1970

8086 286

P6
Pentium proc

386

8080
8008
4004
1980

1990
year

2000

2010

The operating frequency of microprocessors doubles

every two years
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 and the power consumption

Power (Watts)

100

P6
Pentium proc

10

8086 286
1

8008
4004

486
386

8085
8080

0.1
1971

1974

1978
1985
year

1992

2000

The power consumption is unaffordable!!

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The power consumption will be (is) THE problem

100000

18KW
5KW
1.5KW
500W

Potencia (Watts)

10000
1000
100

Pentium proc

286 486
8086 386
10
8085
8080
8008
1 4004
0.1
1971 1974 1978 1985 1992 2000 2004 2008
year

Power supply and dissipation id prohibitive

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Power / Frequency

ITRS_2013SysDrivers_Summary.pdf
www.itrs.net
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Power density

Power density (W/cm2)

10000

1000

100
8086
10 4004
P6
8008 8085
Pentium proc
386
286
486
8080
1
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
year

Power density does not allow to maintain the PN junctions at low temperature

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Is power consumption so important?

Source: Borker, De Intel

Year

2005

2006

2007

2010

2013

2016

Feature Size/nm

80

70

65

45

32

22

MTransistors/chip

1286

1620

2041

4081

8163

16326

Max Clock/GHz

5.2

5.6

6.7

11.5

19.3

28.8

Main Voltage/V

1.0

1.0

0.9

0.8

0.7

0.6

Power (high)/W

170

180

190

218

251

288

Power (battery)/W

3.2

3.5

3.5

3.0

3.0

3.0

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Is power consumption so important?

It is foreseen that the average battery life will increase by 3040% over the next five years
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