In the power and energy balance, Freescale's innovators reign
Freescale is a leader in power management techniques. We recognize that power and energy are the biggest challenge facing designers and customers across a broad range of markets and applications. We are attacking power management at every level, from process and design technologies to system-level design and development software.
Everything we do is designed around power management that provides customers the greatest application possibilities.
Leading the Way in Cutting-Edge Techniques
We've developed and perfected processes and techniques enabling low-power performance, including
- Active well bias
- Metallization IR drop reduction
- Dynamic voltage frequency scaling
- Dynamic process temp control
- Level shifting
- State retention power gating
- Ultra low leakage transistors/circuit tech
- Dynamic correction of timing in DVFS
Perfecting Transistors
We've revolutionized transistors in several areas, including—
- Transport
- High mobility/injection velocity (STRAIN)
- High drive current for low intrinsic delay
- Electrostatics
- Retain gate control over channel
- Minimize OFF-state drain-source leakage
- Parasitic
- Reduced extrinsic resistance (ErSi, PrSi)
- Low K spacers
- Laser anneals
- Gate Dialectric
- Gate leakage/scaling
- Reduced power consumption
- Metal Gates
Hierarchical View of Freescale Energy Conservation
Freescale offers a comprehensive solution to energy management which includes process, circuits, architecture, platform, methodology and system level software as a holistic approach to controlling a system's energy. Freescale's design techniques help tune our systems for the best power/performance trade-offs.
| System Software |
Dynamic system monitoring (app, OS, middleware, hardware) and intelligent dynamic control (in time, temperature) of deployed energy saving techniques |
| Design Methodology and Tools |
System-to-silicon IC design optimisation across power, throughput, latency, area constraints |
| Platform Techniques |
Power trees, connectivity of components, and platform power modes |
| Architectural Techniques |
Heterogeneous processing resource optimization: MCU, DSP, accelerators, functional processing units |
| Circuit Techniques |
Hardware support for power gating, low-power idle modes, workload monitoring, Dynamic Proc/Temp Compensation, etc. |
| Process Technology |
Transistor design, low-power technology libraries, the capability to mix and match devices with different threshold voltages and gate oxides |
Our 90nm low-power CMOS technology and transistor innovation are challenging standards limits on power, energy, and size. Our 90nm low-power technology includes MAX91321–3G Baseband, ARM 1136 @ 532Mhz, StarCore DSP, over 101 million transistors, six to nine layers of Cu metal, dynamic voltage and frequency, and units with a <70nm minimum feature size.