Monday, June 6, 2011

SuVolta offers game-changing technology to reduce power consumption in digital products

LOS GATOS, USA: SuVolta Inc., a Silicon Valley-based company previously in stealth mode, announced its PowerShrink low-power platform, a technology that reduces the power consumed by electronic chips by 50 percent or more while maintaining the same performance levels.

Reducing power consumption is generally regarded as the biggest challenge in chip design today, a problem which limits the functionality and battery lifetime in portable products including smartphones, tablets and notebooks.

SuVolta tackled the power problem at the heart of electronic systems by addressing the physics behind transistor variation.

The end result is the SuVolta PowerShrink platform, a technology that addresses the primary cause of excess power consumption by minimizing the electrical variation of the millions of transistors on a chip.

Led by Dr. Scott E. Thompson, an internationally-recognized expert on advanced MOSFET technologies and former University of Florida professor and Intel Fellow, SuVolta’s team of scientists and engineers essentially redefined the planar, bulk CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) transistor and related circuits, radically lowering the power consumption without the need for new fabrication equipment or design infrastructure.

“This last point is key,” said Thompson, CTO at SuVolta. “When you move away from planar, bulk CMOS, you’re asking the semiconductor industry to bear a huge cost burden, literally billions of dollars, associated with developing new manufacturing facilities and circuit designs. SuVolta’s technology works within existing designs and IP flows, and with existing equipment.”

SuVolta licenses its technology to semiconductor companies, with Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited being the first to publicly commit to the technology.

SuVolta expects the PowerShrink platform to be in production in 2012.

“While the industry’s focus has historically been on performance, more recently power has become the biggest design constraint for electronic products,” said Dr. Bruce McWilliams, president and CEO of SuVolta. “By providing the industry with a clever and easily manufacturable way to cut power in half or more, SuVolta makes possible the development of portable products with extended time between battery charges. The SuVolta PowerShrink platform will scale to much smaller feature sizes and bring advantages for future generations of integrated circuit designs.”

Similar to a new engine that provides double the miles-per-gallon and easily fits into an existing automobile chassis, SuVolta’s technology enables semiconductor products to run for twice as long with the same total energy consumption while not requiring changes to the existing semiconductor design and manufacturing infrastructure.

SuVolta is backed by a premier group of investors with broad experience building leadership companies and with an outstanding track record of funding companies who have built significant and long-term value. SuVolta’s investors include leading venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), August Capital and NEA. SuVolta received $22M in funding in May 2010.

“SuVolta’s PowerShrink platform can greatly reduce the power consumption of digital ICs, a $130B market,” said Bill Joy, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and SuVolta board member. “This will enable straightforward power reductions in existing ICs and libraries, and even greater improvements in new, and more aggressive designs which use additional capabilities of the SuVolta PowerShrink platform."

“IC market growth is being driven primarily by mobile multimedia platforms. Continued miniaturization and integration of advanced functions, however, is limited by the IC’s power consumption,” said Handel Jones, president and CEO, International Business Strategies Inc.

“SuVolta has defined a way to break the power impasse with its innovative low-power technology that has been demonstrated to significantly reduce power consumption. The PowerShrink platform extends the value of 65nm process technology and similarly has strong potential for 28nm and beyond. This breakthrough is particularly important as the cost of scaling to smaller process technologies becomes more and more prohibitive.”

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