By Vic Kulkarni, GM & SVP, RTL Business Unit of Apache Design Solutions

Apache acquired Sequence Design in 2009. Prior to the acquisition, Vic served as Sequence's President and CEO since 2002 and was instrumental in driving the Company's vision in the low-power chip design software solutions for leading worldwide customers. Vic was named "Entrepreneur of the Month" by SiliconIndia magazine and secured Sequence a spot in Reed Electronics' "50 Electronics Companies to Watch." Before joining Sequence he held executive management positions with Avant! and Meta-Software, which he helped take public with a market cap of $160 million, and served in engineering and marketing roles with several legendary Silicon Valley companies, including VLSI and National Semiconductor.

Key trends driving the industry and ANSYS-Apache

In today's connected world, several factors are driving the increasing demand for more power-efficient ICs and electronic systems, including: The proliferation of high performance mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers. NPD researchers predict that the mobile processor sector will grow at a rate of 22 percent each year through 2016. That’s after this area already nearly doubled in 2011 when mobile processor growth exceeded 43 percent. The escalating use and functionality of these devices is driving manufacturers to develop more power-efficient electronic components that extend battery life.

The growing demand for smaller form factor electronic systems. This requires designers to deliver products that consume less power while still satisfying performance requirements. IC and electronic system manufacturers have begun marketing battery life as a key differentiating product feature. In addition, the explosion in system-to-system wireless communications is amplifying the amount of noise within and between ICs, threatening the system with malfunction or failure.

On the other end of power consumption spectrum from mobile side is the side of high-performance computing (HPC) applications like farms of servers which are in worldwide data centers. Rising electricity costs for information technology infrastructure demand more power-efficient products that consume less energy. According to IDC, the expense associated with powering and cooling the worldwide server installed base increased at a compound annual growth rate of 9.5% from 2005 to 2009. As a result, data center operators are seeking solutions that reduce electricity costs without sacrificing performance. In a recent report by Oregon Live, it was stated that Google’s global power consumption is ~258 million watts, roughly equal to 188,000 homes to service the user base doing Google searches to doing a myriad of daily functions on-line.