Open-Silicon joins Power Forward Initiative

MILPITAS, USA: Open-Silicon Inc., a leading ASIC design and semiconductor manufacturing company, has joined the Power Forward Initiative (PFI), an industry effort sponsored by Cadence Design Systems with the goal of enabling the design and production of more power-efficient electronic devices.

"Our customers have become very sensitive to power efficiency. Many mainstream designs, which were not traditionally power sensitive, are now paying close attention to power consumption due to exponential growth in leakage power and higher dynamic power from increasing levels of integration and performance," said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, CEO and president of Open-Silicon.

"We have demonstrated our commitment to building high-performance, low-power designs for our customers using our PowerMAX technology. Now our move to join PFI reinforces our commitment to meet our customers' needs."

Open-Silicon's MAX Technologies offer customers power saving advantages like back biasing, transistor transformations, and power recovery. The combination of the best low-power EDA design flows with Open-Silicon's unique technologies allows building the best possible custom silicon.

The company recently announced that Solarflare has successfully used PowerMAX in its second-generation SFC9020 Ethernet Controller with integrated 10Gb Ethernet PHY, which has been sampling to Tier1 server OEMs. This is the third generation of Solarflare silicon built by Open-Silicon, and the second designed using Open-Silicon's PowerMAX technology to optimize the silicon for low power.

"The addition of Open-Silicon to the Power Forward Initiative demonstrates the ongoing strong industry support behind our mission," said Neil Hand, director of low power solutions at Cadence Design Systems. "Open-Silicon's extensive and varied design and manufacturing experience provides a unique perspective to the group and we look forward to the addition of the company."