AVS Anchor Seminar

Abstract

The traditional process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) corner timing sign-off was developed for electronic boards where multiple ICs are powered by a shared regulator. For today’s high-power Cloud SOCs we are observing a paradigm shift where sophisticated power controllers with many parallel power stages aggregate supply currents in the kA range just for a single IC. Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS) schemes to optimize the supply voltage for a single IC open significant power saving opportunities by rightsizing the supply voltage to the process corner, temperature, and dynamic supply voltage drop of each chip. In this paper we will present a holistic optimization strategy for high-power, low supply voltage SOCs with AVS and their timing closure and sign-off. Leveraging AVS in the implementation can lead to a higher quality final product with less work by eliminating harmful timing scenarios that increase power unnecessarily. To enable intellectual property from different providers to operate efficiently in a shared AVS power domain additional standardization of timing sign-off in the semiconductor industry appears beneficial to avoid uneven levels of optimization and robustness in a design.

Biography

In 2024, Christian Lütkemeyer established PIX-EDA LLC with the goal of sharing essential knowledge in the holistic design of low-power, high-performance digital system-on-chips (SOCs). Prior to founding PIX-EDA, he served as a Senior Distinguished Engineer at Marvell Technology Inc., where he focused on methodologies for creating top-tier SOCs in the coherent optical transceiver domain. Christian joined Marvell following its acquisition of Inphi Corporation in 2021, which had previously acquired ClariPhy Inc. in December 2016. He became part of ClariPhy in February 2016, bringing over 16 years of experience from Broadcom Corporation’s Office of the CTO, where he led the Timing Sign-Off Center of Excellence at his departure after an exciting journey that started in 1999 with the custom digital implementation of DSP algorithms.

At PIX-EDA, Christian is engaged in developing technology to assess silicon performance and supply voltage variations, while advocating for holistic implementation and timing sign-off strategies aimed at resource-efficient SOC development with AVS.

He is inventor or co-inventor of 18 patents and obtained his Dr.-Ing. degree from Aachen University of Technology in Germany.