Power in need, Power indeed

Power in need, Power indeed

After some cautious and tentative moments, I finally managed to get my first post out. In this debut blog post, I’d like to introduce myself, present my bona fides and give you some idea about the likely content you’ll see here on a regular basis.

 I’m Arvind Narayanan, Product Marketing Manager in the Place and Route Division at Mentor. I started my career as a Microprocessor design engineer for Hal Computer Systems (no the name was not derived from the movie) when 0.3u was state of the art and 100 Mhz was considered blazingly fast. I have been with the semiconductor industry for about 14 years in different capacities, ranging from processor design engineer to application engineer and currently in Product Marketing. After my design tenure at Hal, I worked at Synopsys focusing on STA and then at Magma Design focusing on low power design implementation and analysis. I earned my Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Mississippi State University, and my MBA from Duke University (and I’m ardent Blue Devil fan!).

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In the last five years I have seen the “low power” buzz gather enough momentum to the point where it is now being used in the design engineer vernacular alongside with timing – as in “Dude, did you close the design and are we cool?” I have been part of key product launches primarily targeted for the power-savvy engineering community to design greener chips. I have also been very involved in the development of the Unified Power Format (UPF), now p1801, initiative right from the inception to give the designers the long awaited power constraints file – take that sdc. My position here affords me a comprehensive view of the low-power trends and challenges faced by a variety of in-the-trenches designers. I will speak to the usefulness of different technologies and methodologies, talk about new ideas that arise in the technical press or conferences, and describe how specific challenges in low power design have been solved by our customers.

Please add this blog to your RSS feed, and leave comments and questions for me. I hope for this to be a fruitful and engaging encounter for everyone. A good place for me to start is by pointing you to the newly remodeled Mentor website with a dedicated low-power solution section. I won’t reiterate the website content in my blog posts, but the methodologies you’ll find on the Low Power Solution site reflect my point of view. Check it out when you have some time to spare: http://www.mentor.com/solutions/low-power.

 Next blog, I’ll ruminate on the relative importance of ESL, implementation, and verification to overall power reduction. Till then I remain…

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