Design of Integrated Circuits for the Power Domain

Until the late 80's, the only constraints when designing integrated circuits (IC's) were the area and speed. The field of low power design was confined to applications such as digital wrist watches or cardiac pacemakers. In the beginning of the early 90's, this changed rapidly with the growing demand for portable electronic equipment such as cellular phones and notebook computers. However, decreasing feature sizes and the demand for real-time processing systems have resulted in a level of miniaturisation where the heat dissipation is now the main problem. Here the trade-off between special packaging, capable of cooling the chip and expensive fan solutions has to be balanced against the consumer’s demand for low cost applications. Furthermore, the recent demand for environmentally friendly consumer goods have pushed companies to design non-portable systems using low power techniques. This has resulted in increased market share for companies producing such 'green machines'.