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Jan Rabaeys remarkable short course in Low-Power Design Essentials, Part 1 | Steve Leibson

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Jan Rabaeys remarkable short course in Low-Power Design Essentials, Part 1

Posted on March 1, 2012 by sleibson321

At the end of January, UC Berkeley EECS Professor Jan Rabaey gave a comprehensive one-evening course in
low-power design essentials to about 100 people attending a meeting of the Santa Clara Valley chapter of the
IEEE Solid State Circuits Society. It was a comprehensive presentation, given the amount of time available,
and it extended information in Rabays book, Low Power Design Essentials, published by Springer in 2009. In
this blog post and subsequent posts, I will attempt to summarize more than two hours of Rabaeys rapid-fire
presentation.
Why is power important today? Thats how Rabaey started his presentation. He answered his question this
way:
Power now plays a role in virtually every component of the electronic ecosystem, which consists of an
infrastructural corethe cloud built with a massive number of computer racks, servers, high-speed routers,
storage systems, and cooling systems; multiple networks of mobile devices connected to the cloud through
cellular, WiFi, and other wireless and wired networks; and then the extended ecosystem of all electrically
powered devices, which Rabaey called the sensor swarm. There are millions of servers and other large
systems in the clouda constantly growing number. There are already billions of mobile devices connected to
the cloud, and there are or will be hundreds of billions or trillions of devices in the sensor swarm. Each of these
ecosystem niches has very different needs with respect to power and energy.

The majority of all computation is headed to the cloud. Why? Thats where the largest and most concentrated
energy is located. Thats where the cooling systems are located. Thats where theres room for massive amounts
of storage. Ultimately, said Rabaey, 99% of all computation will be performed in the cloud because our
appetite for computation and storage is insatiable. We will feed that ferocious appetite mostly by growing the
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Jan Rabaeys remarkable short course in Low-Power Design Essentials, Part 1 | Steve Leibson

cloud and mobile devices will be our means of accessing information in the cloud.
The mobile device tier exists to put information into and to extract information from the cloud. We can
already see that tier expanding rapidly with Smartphones and tablets currently taking the lead. No doubt we
will invent more device types as we devise new ways to collect and interpret the information were storing in
the cloud.
Rabaey foresees an immense sensor swarm. He believes that sensors will essentially become as numerous as
grains of sand on the beach. Theyll be in our walls, on our bodies, and in our bodies. Eventually, there will be
trillions of these sensors in the swarm, all reporting to the cloud, so that the entire ecosystem can become more
aware of its physical surroundings and manage itself accordingly. A simple example: a room should be able to
switch its lights off when theres no one in the room.
Each of these three ecosystem tiers has different power and energy needs. In fact, power (used as a synonym for
both power and energy from this point on in this blog entry) plays a critical role for each of the three ecosystem
tiers and its one of the most compelling factors driving the design of devices and systems in each tier.
Performance is still key, but power is equally important because if you cannot design a device or system to
work within the available power envelope, then you will not get the desired performance.
Rabaey then turned to the central tierthe cloud. After one or two years, he said, the annual cost of running a
data center is approximately equal to the cost of powering and cooling the center. In other words, once the
capital equipment is in place, equipment maintenance and upgrades are a small fraction of ongoing the
operating cost. The energy costs needed to run and cool the data center consume almost the entire annual
operating budget of the center and those costs are largemillions of dollars per center.
Mobile phone handsets have a different sort of power constraint: about 3W. Thats about all you can get from
todays battery technology and about all you can dissipate in a persons hand without burning the skin.
Asbestos gloves are not likely to become hot fashion accessories.
As far as new, more advanced battery technology, Rabaey said Batterys Law is slow, way slower than Moores
Law. However, the market is not so patient as to put up with Batterys Law. Performance requirements are
always escalating so design engineers must scale component power consumption to get more performance and
more function from the same amount of power.
We have started to turn to multicore designs to get more performance per Watt, said Rabaey, but multicore
platforms are only a partial answer. The real opportunities, he said, will come from architectural innovations
they will come from a system perspective.
Let me repeat that, because its been said for 10 years and its not sinking in based on my own observations:
The real opportunities will come from a system perspective.
Why?
Because, as Rabaey next said, once youve tried all the circuit tricks in the book (and we have, as youll see), you
have to ask yourself What can I do next?
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Jan Rabaeys remarkable short course in Low-Power Design Essentials, Part 1 | Steve Leibson

The sensor swarm, I think, is where Rabaeys real interest lies. Why? Because Ive seen him give presentations
about sensor networks for years. Rabaey called sensors disappearing electronics. They need to be very low in
cost, very small, and they need to be self-contained from an energy perspective.
Now mobile devices also need to be self-contained, but we often recharge them or change their batteries. That
will not work for the sensor swarm. We cant replace batteries in trillions of devices, said Rabaey. In other
words, Rabaey believes that these sensors must either carry all the energy theyll ever need in the form of a
battery that neither needs replacing or charging or these sensor systems must be able to harvest useful energy
from their environment (light, heat, electromagnetic radiation, or vibration). Such systems must use mere
microwatts of power. This is a very tall order for todays designers.
After refining the definition of the three ecosystem tiers, Rabaey then differentiated the power and energy
needs of the three tiers. Power is more important for high-performance systems in the cloud. The central issue
is heat removal followed by the delivery of peak power and then energy cost. Portable systems are all about
battery life while zero-power sensors have unique requirements for energy scavenging and storage.
Having set the stage by defining the three electronic ecosystem tiers, Rabaey then gave a review of existing
low-power design techniques that focused on digital circuit power and energy consumption. Although circuit
power and energy consumption consists of two parts (dynamic and static), designers were able to ignore static
power consumption (leakage) during most of the CMOS age, which really started in the early 1980s. During
this golden age, process lithography scaling was a win-win proposition because it delivered linear power
scaling with improved circuit speed. Who couldnt love that? In fact, we loved it so much, we gave other powerreduction design techniques either lip service or a lick and a prayer. Circuit scaling worked so well, who could
ask for anything more?
That was the golden age and this is now.
As we continued to scale into the deep submicron and then nanometer regions, we also began to reduce the
power supply voltages to further cut power consumption. Old-timers will remember a time when everything
digital (well, nearly everything digital) ran from a 5V power supply rail. This supply voltage was a holdover
from the bipolar TTL (transistor-transistor logic) days of the 1970s and 1980s and that power supply voltage
level stayed with us for a very long time. (Note: Really old timers will remember that the earlier RTL (resistortransistor logic, NOT register transfer level) integrated circuits ran on 3V or 3.6V, so 5V is not a magic
supply voltage. It just seemed that way for more than two decades.)
Eventually, however, we needed to continue reducing power consumption and dropping the power supply
voltage was a great, relatively pain-free way to cut power consumption levels. So we first dropped supply levels
to 3.3V.
Wow! Instant power reduction of nearly 60%!
Then came 2.5V quickly followed by a sliding decline to supply rails near 1V. If you want, you can actually run
digital nanometer CMOS circuitry at 400 or 500mV.
But there was a trap waiting at lower supply voltage levels and weve sprung it. As the power supply voltage
starts to approach the threshold voltage of the digital transistors, transistors dont switch as fast. Once we got
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to 90nm, CMOS circuits started to lose performance even though transistor sizes continued to shrink under
the unblinking glare of Moores Law. Wed upheld Moores Law but wed killed Dennard Scaling in the process.
Memo to circuit designers: loss of performance is unacceptable. Its uncompetitive. Its unthinkable.
So the circuit designers answer, of course, was to drop the transistor threshold voltage to give back some of
the lost speed. The downside of this approach is that the transistors dont turn off as fast. They stay on for
longer and longer amounts of time. During that time, power flows through the partially on transistors.
Nevertheless, we have taken this path with the result that leakage levels have risen to the point that just about
half of the power consumed by a device is now static dissipation.
Leakage. In the words of the childrens song: Theres a hole in the bucket dear Liza, dear Liza.
And so scaling alone will no longer take us in the direction we want to go with respect to power consumption.
Going forward from here, we will still need to use all of the circuit tricks we have developed during the golden
age of CMOS but we will also need to do somethingmany thingsmore.
Fortunately, theres a lot more we can do. Ill discuss that topic in the next blog entry about Jan Rabaeys
remarkable short course in low-power design.
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