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pcbit

pcbit

Summary

OCTAL has developed and is presently commercialising a PCBIT board which plugs into the PC's ISA bus and allows an ISDN' interface. The current PCBIT board uses off-the-shelf components based on the Siemens chipset. The objective of this project is to redesign this board in a PC-Card format with a PCMCIA interface so that the portable PC market can be targeted.

Essential for the success of a product in the portable market is its low power consumption. We propose to design an ASIC to integrate much of the functionality of the off-the-shelf components. We expect to achieve significant power savings by this process alone. Moreover, we plan to explore some power management techniques to further reduce power consumption.

Objectives

Design of a PC-Card board that implements the PCBIT interface;

Integrate levels 1 and 2 of the communication protocol in a single ASIC;

Incorporate power management techniques in the ASIC design:

system level: shut-down of idle modules in the circuit,

gate level: precomputation, gated-clock FSMs;

Evaluate the impact of the different power reduction methods used;

Promote the design methodology and design experiment results.

Participants

INESC (P), Octal (P)

Design Story

Public Deliverables