EDA Tech Forum

Consumer products require specialized multi-core architectures to meet power constraints. Market windows and risk favor software implementations.

Consumer electronics is a difficult business.Market windows open and close quickly. Cost is critical. Requirements change unpredictably. Risk is high. Functionality and performance increase with every product generation, while both manufacturing-limitations and feature-driven demand require low power implementations. Of all these, power constraints have the largest impact on current product architectures. As CMOS reaches its scaling limits, multicore approaches must be used to meet performance needs within stringent low power constraints. At the same time, to manage product complexity and risk, implementations strive to maximize functionality in software without breaking cost or power budgets.

Multi-Core architectures

Multi-core architectures can be broadly classified as symmetric and asymmetric in their processing capabilities.

In symmetric multi-processing architectures, the workload is divided across a set of similar processors.With this architecture, software can run on any available processor.However, for most embedded applications, data flows and processing loads are never uniform, so finding an efficient mapping to a symmetric architecture is very unlikely. Data movement alone can easily break a power budget.