Synfora intros PICO Extreme Power for low power applications

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Synfora Inc., the premier provider of algorithmic synthesis tools for IC and system designers of large, complex processing applications, announced PICO Extreme Power to reduce power consumption, which is a major consideration in designing mobile devices.

The new PICO Extreme Power is the industry’s first algorithmic synthesis tool to automatically minimize power consumption at the system-level based on a variety of techniques, including automatic multi-level clock gating insertion.

Multi-level clock gating enables clock gating to be applied to a computation block in an application accelerator at any level in the hierarchy. PICO Extreme Power has delivered savings of up to 50 percent using this technique.

Researchers at Rice University were amongst the first users of PICO Extreme Power and designed and evaluated a low-density parity check (LDPC) decoder for the next generation wireless handset SoC. They demonstrated a 23.5 percent reduction in dynamic power over an identical design using a standard flow.

Similarly, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) evaluated the effectiveness of the approach using eight complex applications from video, imaging and wireless domains. The results indicate as much as 50% savings in dynamic power for executing a single task in some of the applications and as much as 30% savings while executing a large number of tasks. The average power reduction over all applications was 22% for a single task and 15% over multiple tasks.

“Introducing power minimization at the system or architecture level has a greater impact on power consumption than that implemented at the RTL or circuit level, and adding architecture-level power optimization capabilities to a high-level algorithmic synthesis tool can provide significant benefits for low-power IC designs,” said Prof. Joseph Cavallaro, Rice University. “The results of our research clearly demonstrate that the clock gating capabilities available with the PICO Extreme Power tool can be a major contributor to decreasing power consumption.”

In two additional designs generated using PICO Extreme Power, RTL level power estimates done with the Atrenta SpyGlass-Power solution, showed power reductions of 16 percent and 53 percent compared with designs without block-level clock gating.

“Using SpyGlass-Power in conjunction with PICO Extreme Power enables designers to manage power consumption early in the design and ensure that the power savings can be measured before the generated RTL goes to implementation. This flow has the potential to make significant improvements in the power efficiency of SoCs,” said Piyush Sancheti, senior director of business development at Atrenta.

In traditional RTL (Register Transfer Language) design methodologies, inserting clock gating at a block level is usually a manual effort because it requires the knowledge of when the block is inactive. Using PICO Extreme Power, the designer uses directives to specify where to insert clock gating, and PICO does the rest automatically.

As a result, PICO Extreme Power allows designers to retain all the productivity benefits of automated synthesis and verification, including reduced design and verification time and the ability to react very rapidly to changes in the design specification, while optimizing the IC power consumption.

PICO platform
The PICO Algorithmic Synthesis Platform provides productivity gains by creating application accelerators from an untimed C algorithm at the highest level of abstraction. PICO yields QoR (quality of results) that is competitive with manual design by using a unique parallelizing compiler and multi-level hierarchical abstraction and IP reuse.

It offers the highest possible level abstraction for large designs, and has been proven to provide huge productivity gains on the largest production designs, not just on small blocks.