Extracting value from integrating power-management

Update: Cadence Completes Acquisition of Cosmic Circuits (May 23, 2013)

By Krishnan Ramabadran, Cosmic Circuits
January 2, 2007 -- powermanagementdesignline.com

Find out how to get the most from your SoC design for meeting multiple power needs.

In today's convergence world, the complexity of the system demands a lot from the supply and management of power. The world of a single high-power lossy regulator for supplying power to the whole system is long gone by. A typical portable system has a multiplicity of regulators " both in type and in numbers. As System-on-Chips (SoC) provide more to the system in terms of the level of integration, performance and battery-life to the system, integration of power-management into the SoC becomes a natural "low-hanging fruit" to offer to the system-integrators of today.

First, let us take a quick look at what actually necessitates such complex power-regulator requirements. For this, it would be instructive to explore the insides of a cell-phone or any other portable gadget. The following figure shows the functions that a high-end portable gadget would integrate.

Figure 1: Integrated functions integrated on high-end portable device

We will now see how the power-design for such a complex system can be a significant challenge for the system integrator

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