With the development of more and more power-consuming mobile applications, the battery lifetime has become the biggest challenge of a low-power System-on-Chip (SoC).
Success in designing a low-power SoC requires successive attention to five intertwined networks:
- the exchange network between functional blocks through data busses,
- the clock distribution network, possibly enabling clock gating and frequency scaling,
- the voltage regulation network, possibly enabling Dual Voltage and Frequency Stepping (DVFS),
- the control network of power islands, managing changes of power modes implying transitions of clock frequencies and voltage regulator states,
- the application network which spans over the PCB.
Developing and verifying a control network in a low-power SoC is a challenging task, especially managing the different states of regulators and modes of power domains.
This article first describes state-of-the-art approaches to addressing this issue, and then delves into the solution promoted by Dolphin Integration to go further, thanks to the easy and secure Maestro™ solution to manage SoC power mode transitions.
To go further on this topic, discover the unique Maestro™ network.
