A New Frontier in Energy Efficiency

Bringing Ultra Power Efficient SoC Solutions to the Cloud

Tackling power challenges on high performance switches, AI inferencing engines, CPUs and interconnect products such as CXL memory expanders.

The biggest challenge in cloud computing is delivering the performance needed to handle increasing workloads while minimizing power consumption. Today, data centers consume about 2% of the electricity worldwide. That could rise to 13% by 2030. Networking and server chips remain the primary factor in determining data center performance, power consumption, and cost. Although designers leverage new process nodes, multi-die designs, and new architectures, immense leaps in performance keep driving chip-, system-, and datacenter-power increases.

Data center processors face unique power challenges given their various workloads. At one moment, these chips may be at 10% utilization and suddenly ramp to 50% because of a workload swing. These rapid shifts induce voltage droops and simultaneous switching effects, creating ripples across a power network. To prevent timing glitches, designers may margin their voltage budget or increase the thickness of the power (VDD) and ground (VSS) rails. However, these techniques can quadratically increase power or impact the number of metal layers and size of the chip.

One way to reclaim power efficiency while improving performance is to address the SoC-level clock distribution challenges. By optimizing and re-architecting a clock network, designers can not only reduce total clock power consumption, but by mitigating the impact of voltage droops, and disperse simultaneous switching noise effects, can reduce both peak current draw and voltage margin which reduces average power and negative effects on system components, such as inductors.

The Aeonic™ platform resolves these issues by providing application-optimized digital components that intelligently orchestrate timing across an SoC. Fully synthesizable components achieve unrivaled power savings and offer superior PPA to traditional analog and partial-digital solutions. Aeonic enables power-efficient,  high-performance solutions for cloud computing.