Flow Implements Intelligent Energy Management

To address the need for low leakage and reduced dynamic power drain in portables, ARM and Synopsys have partnered on a reference design flow for the ARM11 family of processors, which implements ARM's Intelligent Energy Manager (IEM) technology. When used with ARM's Artisan low-power library, IEM technology can reduce an ARM11 processor's power consumption by up to 60%.

IEM technology performs dynamic voltage scaling based on software-based analysis of the system's processor utilization. That analysis is used to predict the system's future performance requirements. The IEM's hardware component then translates that performance prediction into an appropriately scaled voltage.

Built on Synopsys' Galaxy design platform, the ARM-Synopsys Galaxy reference methodology for IEM includes an enhanced methodology guide and scripts that express best design practices.

The IEM reference methodology for the ARM1176JZ-S and JZF-S cores will be available at the end of the first quarter from ARM. It also will be applied to other IEM-enabled ARM cores, including the ARM11 MPCore multiprocessor.