Honolulu - Circuit designers looking to tame the beast of power consumption will have to chip away at the problem from every possible angle and hope that the sum of those efforts does the job. Researchers at the 2002 Symposium on VLSI Circuits here last week said there is no quick fix on the horizon to quell the rise in both active-power and leakage current in next-generation semiconductor devices. "There is no silver bullet when it comes to power," said Shekhar Borkar, an Intel fellow working at the Hillsboro, Ore., circuit research center. "We have to attack the problem with a series of 10 percent improvements, and if we have enough of them it adds up." Intel, IBM and other chip makers have come up with a flurry of proposals suggesting several lines of attack on the power problem. In Honolulu, Intel researchers presented 18 papers with power savings as the central theme. IBM, for its part, described a dual-supply-voltage strategy for high-performance microprocessors that is claimed to save power while maintaining performance.
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