Rezonent Corporation is on a mission to recycle, reuse and thus radically reduce power and heat in semiconductor devices driving the entire digital world. For both the smartphone and data center end-markets, energy consumption, both useful and wasteful, as electricity and heat, is a major problem. Power bills and cooling costs now more than double the equipment costs for data centers. Trapped heat in smartphones reduces reliability and causes meltdowns. These two end-applications alone are a trillion-dollar market. Add in the future self-driving cars, Artificial Intelligence (needing data centers that never sleep) and that number grows exponentially. Our solution leaves existing power management schemes in place and does not impact design flows or device performance. We believe the solution can shift the entire industry to 30% more energy efficient designs.
Rezonent technology employs on-chip inductors to preemptively capture the energy, otherwise dissipated as heat, in the magnetics. In the binary 0/1 digital world, every time billions of transistors change state, from 0 to 1, they draw huge energy. When they transition back from 1 to 0, currently all systems dissipate it as heat. For the next 0 to 1 transition, they need massive energy again. Over and above the total power consumption the heat density can cause havoc with hot spots. Rezonent solves the heat problem by capturing and storing the 1 to 0 energy release and storing it as magnetic energy, before it is lost as heat. The stored energy then drives the next 0 to 1 transition. In essence, we recycle 0’s to power 1’s. We provide the design, software and services to deploy this self-harvesting automatically. This comes out from a deep dive of my Ph.D. research/dissertation. The next challenge is to convert the proven concepts into widespread adoption for a sustainable planet.
Rezonent has solved this crippling heat waste. We’ve developed resonant circuitry that preemptively absorbs the dissipated heat, stores it magnetically, and re-uses it the next time that it’s needed saving up to 50% of the wasted energy. That means more available power and less heat.
Romancing Rezonent Technology
The Innovation
Resonance techniques have been tried before in processors but limited to operation at single frequency and requiring large metal areas blocking other routing. Solving only clocking challenges without matched data solutions complicates the massive timing closure efforts. Designers love the simplicity of design and elimination of clock skew provided by the clock mesh, but couldn’t tolerate the significant increase in power consumption of the clock buffers required to drive the large capacitance of the all-metal grid. Resonant clocking marries the benefits of a clock mesh with the ultra-low power consumption of a tank circuit, which we call a resonant clock mesh. The inductors that are built on the chip, in series with the capacitance of the clock grid, produce a natural oscillator to drive the clock grid with radically reduced power consumption. Whereas prior art (Cyclos) resonant clock meshes solve the power-performance conundrum of only at a single operating frequency Rezonent solution works seamlessly across wide clock rates and needs a ten of the area for inductors.
Simple pulse mode operation with minimal intrusion for wide-band application
The current invention not only reduces the clock power but also the logic, data flip-flops and memory power that form equally power intensive components of the total power consumption as shown above
The Vision
ReZonent clock & data solutions are envisioned to be silicon proven to be very effective in reducing power consumption, increasing performance, and scalable for advanced IC design implementation and manufacturing. As mobile consumers demand more performance and longer battery life from their handheld devices, Rezonent power closures provide the ideal solution. As cloud computing and machine learning becomes more pervasive, data center vendors will also be taking actions to reduce their power consumption and cooling costs. Once again, Rezonent Clocks & RDL are an ideal solution and they can be deployed in networking devices that enable the Internet. Other design applications are plentiful too … there is no shortage of IC designers who need to reduce power consumption and increase performance. With a novel IC design solution to the power-performance conundrum provided by ReZonent, SoC vendors are going to benefit greatly.
The Future
ReZonent clock & data being silicon proven to be very effective in reducing power consumption, increasing performance, and are scalable for advanced IC design implementation and manufacturing. As mobile consumers demand more performance and longer battery life from their handheld devices, resonant clock meshes provide the ideal solution and thus are being deployed by semiconductor vendors in 2018. As cloud computing and machine learning becomes more pervasive, data center vendors will also be taking actions to reduce their power consumption and cooling costs. Once again, Rezonent Clocks & RDL are an ideal solution and they will soon be deployed in networking devices that enable the Internet. Other design applications are plentiful too … there is no shortage of IC designers who need to reduce power consumption and increase performance a novel IC design solution to the power-performance conundrum provided by ReZonent, SoC vendors are going to benefit greatly.
Typically, however, a new IC design technique with such incredible and proven benefits always seem to have with some sort of gotchas. These also become competitive barriers for new entries. Our roadmap and future plans are to file patents and support leading-edge CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) processes that utilize FinFET (Fin Field Effect Transistor) technology.
ReZonent provides electronic design automation tools, intellectual property, and consulting services to IC design engineers. If you would like to find out more about how resonant clock meshes can solve your power-performance IC design conundrum, contact ReZonent at info@ReZonent.in. We’re ready to enable you in achieving cool GHz design success!