CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
23 April 2007
Implementation Investments
Key Stream Hits Low-Power Goals with Sequence's PowerTheater
Key Stream Corporation, designers of low-power wireless LAN chipsets, announced they are using Sequence Design 's PowerTheater to reduce power "when it counts," early in the design cycle, at RTL.
"PowerTheater helps us understand and reduce power at RTL when it counts," said Key Stream senior engineer, Hiroyuki Sakurai. "We get immediate feedback to help us understand the power profile early, allowing the team to examine multiple 'what-if' scenarios to optimize the chip architecture for low power."
Key Stream is designing 802.11a/b/g wireless LAN chipsets, primarily for emerging portable applications where low-power requirements are critical. Sakurai related power-reduction results using PowerTheater for two blocks from a Key Stream design.
In the first block, the Key Stream design team achieved a 50 percent reduction in dynamic power with PowerTheater WattBots and linters, which automatically identified specific power-saving opportunities within the design. In the second example, Key Stream realized the advantages of RTL power analysis using the powerful debug environment of Power Theater over gate-level analysis: Specifically, RTL power analysis made it much simpler to examine tradeoffs between power and speed, a difficult and time-consuming challenge at gate level.
"PowerTheater shows us an easy-to-understand RTL tree, identifying the worst power offenders, so we can quickly spot which modules are a problem and then use WattBots to reduce power," Sakurai said. "And utilizing PowerTheater's peak and vector analysis makes it easy to find wasted power in the design."
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