Green Circuit Optimization
Green Circuit Optimization (GCO) minimizes the total environmental impact accumulated throughout the entire circuit lifecycle – from manufacturing to end-of-life. GCO recognizes that different combinations of power dissipation, chip area, and expected uptime may cause the circuit's total energy footprint to be defined almost entirely by the chip area (manufacturing energy), its power dissipation (in-use energy), or any blending of the two.
The energy footprint of an always-on high performance ADC used in communications infrastructure is completely defined by its power dissipation in use, while an intermittently used low-power sensor node used for environmental monitoring may have such a low power dissipation that its lifetime energy consumption is entirely defined by the energy required to manufacture the chip. In between these two extremes, there are a large number of specifications and use-cases for which a non-trivial tradeoff between power dissipation and chip area renders the optimally "green" circuit.
Green Circuit Optimization relies on EDO techniques and a massive amount of empirical data to accurately predict the relations between performance specifications, chip area and power dissipation. Since EDO also allows the consideration of architectures, circuit techniques, process technology, and circuit-level design parameters such as supply voltage, it becomes possible to look for the globally optimal architecture as well as circuit design for a given specification.
Green Circuit Optimization thus allows global minimization of a circuit's environmental impact to be addressed already at the concept and early architecture design stage. Contact us to know more.