MIT, TI Describe 28nm Mobile Apps Processor

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Texas Instruments (TI) presented a joint research paper this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in which they detailed design methodologies for a 28nm mobile applications processor. This represents one of the first system-level, low-voltage 28nm designs for the mobile market.

The groups' paper was titled "A 28nm 0.6V Low Power Digital Signal Processor (DSP) for Mobile Applications," and demonstrated how a DSP could scale from high-performance mode at 1 volt down to an ultra-low-power (ULP) mode at 0.6 volt. The DSP presented in the paper was designed by a team of MIT students and TI engineers.

It also included descriptions of two challenges frequently faced when designing high-performance ULV products. The first was low-voltage functionality, where within-die random variation in transistor threshold voltage can cause functional failures in circuits at low voltages in deep submicron process nodes. The second involved timing closure in the face of process variations without sacrificing high-voltage performance at nominal voltage.

"The design of a low-voltage processor in 28nm requires a system-level approach—from optimizing the circuit styles and memories to the development of a custom low-voltage timing flow," said MIT professor Anantha Chandrakasan. "This chip demonstrates an aggressive low-power methodology to ensure robust low-voltage and ultra-low-power operation for a smartphone application processor."

In a statement, Gordon Gammie, a member of TI's technical staff and a presenter at ISSCC, said, "As the multimedia and computing capabilities of TI's OMAP™ platform-based smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices increase, there is a continually expanding gap between performance demands and battery capacity. TI believes that 28nm process technology advancements, developed in tandem with TI and MIT's low power circuit and methodology collaboration, gives us the right knowledge base to successfully meet the next-generation processing demands within the future mobile power envelope."

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