Distributed Voltage And Frequency Scaling Gaining Traction

DVFS has been used in smart phones for more than a decade as a way of trading off power and performance when both are constrained, but much of the semiconductor industry has avoided this technique because it's too difficult to work with. That's starting to change as processing demands increase, driven by the rollout of AI everywhere and an increase in the number of features in advanced packages. New tools and techniques make it easier to trade off power and performance at a more granular level than in the past, and with much better results. Lee Vick, vice president of strategic marketing at Movellus, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the benefits of DVFS, how it can improve battery life and performance, and how to embed it into a design.