EECS 150 - Components and Design

Techniques for Digital Systems

Lec 24 –Power, Power, Power

11/27/2007
David Culler
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California, Berkeley

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~culler
http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs150
1
 Broad Technology Trends

Moore’s Law: # transistors on Bell’s Law: a new computer

cost-effective chip doubles every class emerges every 10 years
18 months
Computers
Per Person
1:106
Mainframe

Mini
1:103
Workstation
PC
Laptop
1:1
PDA
Cell

Today: 1 million transistors per $ 103:1

years Mote!
Same fabrication technology provides CMOS radios
for communication and micro-sensors
2
Sustaining Moore’s Law
“If unchecked, the increasing power
requirements of computer chips could
boost heat generation to absurdly high
levels,” said Patrick Gelsinger, Intel’s
CTO is reported to have said.
“By mid-decade, that Pentium PC may
need the power of a nuclear reactor. By
the end of the decade, you might as
well be feeling a rocket nozzle than
touching a chip. And soon after 2010,
PC chips could feel like the bubbly hot
surface of the sun itself,”

3
 Power, Power, Power
• IT devices represent 2% of global
CO2 emissions worldwide

Printers, 6% PCs and

LAN and office
telecom, 7% Monitors, 39%

Mobile
Computers telecom, 9%
Per Person
1:106
Mainframe Fixed-line
Telecom, 15% Servers, 23%
Mini
1:103
Workstation
Source Gartner
PC
Laptop
1:1
PDA
Cell

103:1

years Mote! 4
 What is EECS150 about?
Pgm Language Deep Digital Design Experience
Asm / Machine Lang Fundamentals of Boolean Logic
CS 61C Synchronous Circuits
Instruction Set Arch
Machine Organization Finite State Machines

HDL Timing & Clocking

Device Technology & Implications
FlipFlops
Controller Design
Gates Arithmetic Units
Bus Design
Circuits
Encoding, Framing
Devices
EE 40 Testing, Debugging
Transistor Physics
Hardware Architecture

Transfer Function HDL, Design Flow (CAD)

5
 Data Centers
Client
• 1.5% of total US energy
consumption in 2006
• 60 Billion kWh
• Doubled in past 5 years
and expected to double in
next 5 to 100 Billion kWh
Computers – 7.4 B$ annually
Per Person
EPA report aug 4 2007 delivered to
1:106
Mainframe congress in response to public law
109-431
Mini
1:103 48% of IT budget spent on energy
Workstation
PC 50% of data center power goes into
Laptop
1:1 cooling
PDA
Cell 1 MW DC => 177 M kwH + 60 M
gals water + 145 K lbs copper +
103:1
21 k lbs lead
6
years Mote!
Servers: Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Machine rooms
are expensive …
removing heat
dictates how
many servers can
fit

Electric bill adds

up! Powering the
servers +
powering the air
Reliability: running computers hot conditioners is a
makes them fail more often big part of TCO
7
M. K. Patterson, A. Pratt, P. Kumar,
“From UPS to Silicon: an end-to-end evaluation of datacenter efficiency”, Intel Corporation
8
 P watts = I amps * V volts
This is how electric tea pots work ...
Heats 1 gram of water
0.24 degree C
0.24 Calories per Second
1A 1 Joule of Heat
Energy per Second

+ t
1V
- at
W
1
1 Ohm
Resistor
20 W rating: Maximum power
the package is able to
transfer to the air. Exceed
rating and resistor burns.
9
Basics
• Warning! In everyday language, the term
“power” is used incorrectly in place of “energy”
• Power is not energy
– E=P*T

• Power is not something you can run out of

• Power can not be lost or used up
• It is not a thing, it is merely a rate
• It can not be put into a battery any more than
velocity can be put in the gas tank of a car

10
Data Center Power Usage Today

11
 PC
Client • HPxw4200
– 180 w active with two LCDs
– 130 w w/o monitor, 110 w idle,
J2EE
SOAP
– 6 w suspend
Enterprise • 60% are left on around the clock
Server
• 15% of all office power
• US:
– 1.72 B$ & 15 M tons CO2 annually
Computers
Per Person
• Mid size company:
1:106 – 165 K$ & 1400 tons of CO2
Mainframe • Existing power mgmt (hibernation)
Mini
can reduce by 80%
1:103
Workstation => Do nothing well
PC
Laptop
1:1
PDA
Cell PC Energy Report 2007, 1E

103:1
12
years Mote!
Do Nothing Well

13
 Notebooks ... now most of the PC market
Apple MacBook -- Weighs 5.2 lbs
8.9 in

1 in

12.8 in
Performance: Must be “close enough” to desktop
performance ... many people no longer own a desktop

Size and Weight: Ideal: paper notebook

Heat: No longer “laptops” -- top may get “warm”,

bottom “hot”. Quiet fans OK
14
 Battery: Set by size and weight limits ...

Battery rating:
55 W-hour

At 2.3 GHz, Intel

Core Duo CPU
consumes 31 W
running a heavy load
- under 2 hours
battery life! And,
46x energy than iPod nano. just for CPU!
iPod lets you listen to music
for 14 hours!
Almost full 1 inch depth.
At 1 GHz, CPU consumes
Width and height set by
available space, weight. 13 Watts. “Energy saver”
option uses this mode
15
...
Battery Technology
• Battery technology has developed slowly
• Li-Ion and NiMh still the dominate technologies
• Batteries still contribute significantly to the
weight of mobile devices

Handspring
Nokia 61xx -
PDA - 10%
33%
Toshiba Portege
3110 laptop - 20%
16
 55 W-hour battery stores the
energy of
1/2 a stick of dynamite.

If battery short-circuits,
catastrophe is possible ... 17
CPU Only Part of Power Budget
2004-era notebook running a
full workload.

“other”
GPU If our CPU took no power
at all to run, that would
LCD CPU only double battery life!
Backlight

LCD

18
“X-Internet” Beyond the PC

Internet Computers 500

Million Today’s Internet
Internet Users 1.5 Billion

Automobiles
700 Million

Telephones X-Internet
4 Billion

Electronic Chips
60 Billion

Forrester Research, May 19

2001
Revised 2007
“X-Internet” Beyond the PC

Millions
15000

10000

PC
5000 Internet

X
0 Internet

Year

Forrester Research, May 20

2001
 Cooling an iPod nano ...
Like a resistor, iPod relies
on passive transfer of heat
from case to the air
Why? Users don’t want
fans in their pocket ...

To stay “cool to the touch” via passive cooling,

power budget of 5 W

If iPod nano used 5W all the time, its battery would last
15 minutes ...
21
Powering an iPod nano (2005 edition)
Battery has 1.2 W-hour
rating: Can supply
1.2 W of power for 1 hour
1.2 W / 5 W = 15 minutes
More W-hours require bigger battery
and thus bigger “form factor” --
it wouldn’t be “nano” anymore!

Real specs for iPod nano :

14 hours for music,
4 hours for slide shows

85 mW for music
300 mW for slides
22
0.55 ounces

12 hour
battery life

$79.00

1 GB

23
20 hour battery life for audio,
6.5 hours for movies (80GB version)

24 hour Up from 14 hours

battery life for for 2005 iPod nano
audio
Thinner than 2005 iPod nano
5 hour battery
life for photos Up from 4
hours for 2005
iPod nano

12 hour
battery life

24
What’s in the iPhone?
Motherboard
USB & GSM

Battery

WiFI antenna
GSM antenna

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3026 25
 What’s in your iPhone?
Main Processor
LCD i/f
ARM1176 + 1GB mem

WiFi & Most of Cell Phone

4 GB NAND Flash
• 3 ARM processors

26
 iPhone Parts (?)
• Baseband processor: Infineon – S-
Gold3/ARM926?
• Primax Electronics
Applications/video processor:
Samsung/ARM10 or 11
• 802.11 chip: Marvell/ARM9?
• Touchscreen controller: Broadcom
• Touchscreen: Balda/TPK
• Bluetooth: CSR
• USB IC: Alcor, Phison
• Audio: Wolfson
• Memory module: A-Data, Transcend
• Flash memory: Samsung, Toshiba,
Hynix
• Position sensor (MEMS?):
STMicroelectronics, Analog
devices?
• Light sensor: ???
• Proximity sensor: ???
• Camera sensor: Micron?
• Camera module: Altus or Lite-On Technology,
•
Camera lens: Largan Precision
• Microphone: ???
• Power management: NXP?
• Passives: Cyntec
• Quartz: TXC
• Assembly: Foxconn, FIH
• Casing & mechanical parts: Foxconn & Catcher
• Push button: Sunrex
• Connectors & cable: Entery, Cheng Uei,
Foxlink, Advanced Connectek
• PCB: Unimicron & Tripod
27
 UCB Mote Platforms
* *

Computers
Per Person
1:106
Mainframe

Mini
1:103
Workstation
PC
Laptop
1:1
PDA
Cell
* Crossbow variation
103:1
28
years Mote!
Key Design Elements

Flash Storage Sensor ADC analog sensors

proc timers Interface digital sensors

data logs Wireless Net

Data RF antenna
SRAM pgm Interface transceiver
EPROM
pgm images
WD Wired Net serial link
Interface USB,EN,…
Low-power
Standby & Wakeup

• Efficient wireless protocol primitives

• Flexible sensor interface
• Ultra-low power standby
• Very Fast wakeup
• Watchdog and Monitoring
• Data SRAM is critical limiting resource
29
 TinyOS-driven architecture
• 3K RAM = 1.5 mm2
• CPU Core = 1mm2
– multithreaded
• RF COMM stack = .5mm2
– HW assists for SW stack
• Page mapping
• SmartDust RADIO = .25 mm2
• SmartDust ADC 1/64 mm2
• I/O PADS

• Expected sleep: 1 uW
– 400+ years on AA
• 150 uW per MHz
• Radio:
– .5mm2, -90dBm receive sensitivity
– 1 mW power at 100Kbps
• ADC:
– 20 pJ/sample
– 10 Ksamps/second = .2 uW.

jhill mar 6, 2003

30
 Microcontrollers
• Memory starved
– Far from Amdahl-Case 3M rule
• Fairly uniform active inst per nJ
– Faster MCUs generally a bit better
– Improving with feature size
• Min operating voltage
– 1.8 volts => most of battery energy
– 2.7 volts => lose half of battery energy
• Standby power
– substantial improvement in 2003
– Probably due to design focus
DMA Support: permits ADC
– Fundamentally SRAM leakage
sampling while processor is
– Wake-up time is key sleeping
• Trade sleep power for wake-up
time
– Memory restore

31
What we mean by “Low Power”

• 2 AA => 1.5 amp hours (~4 watt hours)

• Cell => 1 amp hour (3.5 watt hours)

Cell: 500 -1000 mW => few hours active * System design

WiFi: 300 - 500 mW => several hours
GPS: 50 – 100 mW => couple days * Leakage (~RAM)

WSN: 50 mW active, 20 uW passive

450 uW => one year * Nobody fools
mother nature
45 uW => ~10 years

Ave Power = fact * Pact + fsleep * Psleep + fwaking * Pwaking

32
Mote Power States at Node Level

Active Active

Sleep WakeUP Work Sleep WakeUP Work

Telos: Enabling Ultra-Low Power Wireless Research, Polastre, Szewczyk, Culler, IPSN/SPOTS 2005
33
Radios

• Trade-offs:
– resilience / performance => slow wake up
– Wakeup vs interface level
– Ability to optimize vs dedicated support

34
Power to Communicate

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0
0 1 2 3 4 5

35
 Multihop Routing
• Upon each transmission, one of the recipients
retransmits
– determined by source, by receiver, by …
– on the ‘edge of the cell’

36
 Energy Profile of a Transmission

Datasheet
Analysis

20mA • Power up oscillator &

radio (CC2420)
• Configure radio
• Clear Channel
Assessment, Encrypt
10mA
and Load TX buffer
• Transmit packet
• Switch to rcv mode,
listen, receive ACK

5 ms 10 ms

37
Example: TX maximum packet

25

20

15
mA

10

0
-15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15
ms

38
 The “Idle Listening” Problem

• The power consumption of “short range” (i.e., low-

power) wireless communications devices is roughly
the same whether the radio is transmitting, receiving,
or simply ON, “listening” for potential reception
– includes IEEE 802.15.4, Zwave, Bluetooth, and the many variants
– WiFi too!
– Circuit power dominated by core, rather than large amplifiers
• Radio must be ON (listening) in order receive
anything.
– Transmission is infrequent. Reception α Transmit x Density
– Listening (potentially) happens all the time
Total energy consumption dominated by idle listening

39
 Communication Power Consumption

Sleep Transmit
~10 uA ~20 mA x 1-5 ms
[20 - 100 uAs]
I

Time

Time
Listen Receive
~20 mA ~20 mA x 2-6 ms

40
Announcements
• Project Check-offs this week
– TAs posting extra “office hours” for use of slip days
• Dr. Robert Iannucci, Nokia on Thurs
– Bring questions, show off projects
• Short HW 10 out tonight
– Due next wed.
• Wrap-up and Course Survey 12/4
• Project Demos Friday 12/7
– Signup sheet is posted
– 5 min demo + 5 min Q&A
– Set up 20 mins in advance
• Final Exam Group: 15: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18,
2007   5-8P

41
 Basics – Power and Digital Design
• Power supply provides energy for charging and discharging wires
and transistor gates. The energy supplied is stored & then
dissipated as heat.
Power: Rate of work being done wrt time
P  dw / dt Rate of energy being used

Units: P  E t Watts = Joules/seconds

• If a differential amount of charge dq is given a differential increase
in energy dw, the potential of the charge is increased by:
V  dw / dq
I  dq / dt
• By definition of current:

dw dq A very practical
dw / dt    P  V  I formulation!
t
dq dt
w   Pdt total energy If we would like
to know total energy
42

Recall: Transistor-level Logic Circuits
• Inverter (NOT gate):
Vdd

Gnd

what is the
Vdd
relationship
between in and out?

in out

0 volts Gnd
3 volts

43
Older Logic Families have Pullup R

nMOS Inverter

44
 Power in CMOS

Switching Energy: Vdd

energy used to p u llu p

Vdd
switch a node n e tw o rk
i(t)
v (t)

Calculate energy p u lld o w n

0
C
1
v (t)
dissipated in pullup: n e tw o rk t0 t1

GND
t1 t1 t1
Esw   P (t )dt   (Vdd  v)  i (t )dt   (Vdd  v)  c (dv dt ) dt 
t0 t0 t0
t1 t1
 cVdd  dv  c  v  dv  cVdd  1 2cVdd  1 2 cVdd
2 2 2
t0 t0

Energy supplied Energy stored Energy dissipated

An equal amount of energy is dissipated on pulldown

45
 Switching Power

• Gate power consumption:

– Assume a gate output is switching its output at a rate of:  f
activity factor clock rate
(probability of switching on
1 /f
any particular clock period)

Pavg  E t  switching rate  Esw

Therefore:
Pavg    f 1 2 cVdd
2
P avg

• Chip/circuit power consumption: c lo c k f

2
Pavg  n  avg  f 1 2 cavgVdd
number of nodes (or gates) 46
 Other Sources of Energy Consumption

• “Short Circuit” Current: • Junction Diode Leakage :

Vout
I

V in Vout V in Transistor drain regions

“leak” charge to substrate.
I

I
V in
D io d e
10-20% of total chip power C h a ra c te ris tic

~1nWatt/gate
few mWatts/chip
47
Other Sources of Energy Consumption

• Consumption caused by “DC leakage current” (Ids leakage):

Id s
V in = 0 V o u t= V d d

Io ff
V gs
Transistor s/d conductance V th
never turns off all the way

Low voltage processes much worse

• This source of power consumption is becoming increasing
significant as process technology scales down
• For 90nm chips around 10-20% of total power consumption
Estimates put it at up to 50% for 65nm

48
Controlling Energy Consumption:
What Control Do You Have as a
Designer?
• Largest contributing component to CMOS power
consumption is switching power:

Pavg  n  avg  f 1 2 cavgVdd

2

• Factors influencing power consumption:

– n: total number of nodes in circuit
 : activity factor (probability of each node switching)
– f: clock frequency (does this effect energy consumption?)
– Vdd: power supply voltage
• What control do you have over each factor?
• How does each effect the total Energy?

49
Example

A B Operand Registers

add/sub and/or cmp

MUX

R Result Register

• What is the cost of optimistic compute and

select?
• How might we reduce it?

50
Discussion: Digital Design and Power

Pavg  n  avg  f 1 2 cavgVdd

2

• Think about…
– n
 
– f
– c
– Vdd
• In
– Function units
– Registers, FSMs, Counters
– Busses
– Clock distribution

51
Technology Scaling and Design Learning

52
 Scaling Switching Energy per Gate
Moore’s Law
at work …

Due to
reduced V and
C (length and
width of Cs
decrease, but
plate distance
gets smaller)

Recent slope
reduced
because V is
scaled less
aggressively
From: “Facing the Hot Chips Challenge Again”, Bill Holt, Intel, presented at Hot Chips 17, 2005.
53
 Device Engineers Trade Speed and Power

We can reduce CV2 (Pactive)

by lowering Vdd

We can increase speed

by raising Vdd and
lowering Vt

We can reduce leakage

(Pstandby) by raising Vt

From: Silicon Device Scaling to the Sub-10-nm Regime

Meikei Ieong,1* Bruce Doris,2 Jakub Kedzierski,1 Ken Rim,1 Min Yang1
54
 Customize processes for product types ...

From: “Facing the Hot Chips Challenge Again”, Bill Holt, Intel, presented at Hot Chips 17, 2005.
55
Intel: Comparing 2 CPU Generations ...

Find enough
tricks, and
you can
afford to
raise Vdd a
little so that
you can raise
the clock
speed!

Clock speed Design tricks:

unchanged ... Lower Vdd, lower C,
architecture & circuits
but more leakage 56