Date: 20/09/2011

Open-Silicon awarded a patent on lowering power consumption in semiconductor chips

Open-Silicon, Inc has announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent 7,941,776 related to Open-Silicon's PowerMAX technology. This new Open-Silicon patent focuses on lowering dynamic and standby power in SoC semiconductor chips by enriching the target standard library to best fit the needs of a particular design.

Patented technology's explanation by Open-Silicon:
Specifically, this patent encompasses the intellectual property rights of Open-Silicon's ZenCells, standard cells created on-the-fly using PowerMAX's design-specific library augmentation. ZenCells drives down both dynamic and leakage power through a method of closed-loop IC design optimization via the creation of design-specific cells from post-layout patterns. This optimization process involves automatically creating design-specific cells with desired characteristics, such as power, performance, or noise, which are then implemented as a standard cell from a set of post layout patterns. The pattern represents a part of or a whole standard cell and contains information regarding the pattern, such as layout, timing area, power and noise. Because these cells are created from post-layout patterns, the risks of prior dynamic library techniques are easily avoided. The result is cells that are optimized to satisfy the constraints imposed by the design context, thus bringing powerful design-specific customization to standard cell-based design methodology.

"Increasing levels of integration in performance-driven SoCs have challenged designers to come up with novel architectural and physical design solutions for power density limitations. At the other end of the spectrum, mobile applications are driving exponential growth in mobile performance, matched with every-increasing battery life requirements," said Colin Baldwin, director of marketing for Open-Silicon. "Open-Silicon identified this growing problem early on and developed the MAX technologies to solve it. The award of this patent underscores Open-Silicon's commitment to low power technology, and the company's ability to provide its customers with better custom silicon."