Power, heat and leakage have become the bane of chipmakers looking to crank up the clock speed to improve performance.  So this year at the International Solid State Circuits Society (ISSCC) conference in San Francisco, Intel plans to release papers on technologies to crank back the clock.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker will reveal details of a handful of new advances to improve the power usage and heat dissipation of its chips, and offer information on the progress of its efforts at radio on a chip.

“The biggest challenge continues to be power in terms of delivery of power and dissipation of power,” said Shekhar Borkar, Intel Fellow and co-director of the Intel microprocessor technology lab, in a conference call with press and analysts ahead of the conference.  Borkar noted that Intel CTO Pat Gel singer stated in a 2001 keynote address that the days of delivering performance at any cost is history. Rather, moving forward, the industry must start looking at value performance.

With that in mind, the company has shifted its focus to micro-architectures such as multi-threading and multi-processing.

With its upcoming next generation Itanium processor, code-named Montecito, Intel will be introducing Foxton, a new technology to optimize power usage.  With Montecito, Intel’s first billion-plus transistor processor design, Intel plans to reduce the power envelope to 100 watts.

By putting two cores on the die, each two-way multithreaded, Intel has cut down on the frequency requirement to 2GHz, and thereby lowered the power requirement as well.

But the biggest boost came from Foxton, which reduced the power requirement while increasing performance, according to Nimish Modi, VP of Intel’s digital enterprise group and general manager of its enterprise microprocessor division.

“Foxton is a technology that lets us dynamically change the voltage and frequency based on the given application’s requirements,” he said. “We can get up to a 10 percent performance boost, depending on the application, by using Foxton.”

Rather than lowering the frequency for applications with low requirements, Foxton increases the frequency for applications that demand more.

“By default it’s running at 1.6 GHz and won’t go any lower than that for any application,” Modi said. “But it does let you go higher in frequency by up to 10 percent, depending on workload, so you will get more work done in a given period of time.  You would think that just because I’m running at a higher frequency that I’m using more power. But that’s not true. I’m just exploiting the unused portion of the ceiling.”

Foxton is different from demand-based switching, which Intel has previously discussed in the context of its Xeon server platforms.  Intel plans to introduce demand-based switching to Montecito as well as a complementary technology to Foxton.  The difference between the two is in the level of granularity.

“With Foxton I have 32 voltage settings at 12.5 millivolt intervals,” said Modi. “That’s a fine level of granularity, and I can modulate frequency at 64 steps.”  Another difference is that Foxton requires no interaction with the operating system – it is completely contained on the die. 

There’s nothing about Foxton that limits it to the Itanium platform, and Intel plans to eventually integrate the technology on the Xeon platform, Modi said.

Intel also plans to reveal its advances in its CMOS radio research during the conference. The company is continuing to work its MIMO (multiple input multiple output) antenna system in 90nm CMOS technology, said Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, director of communications circuits research at Intel’s communications technology lab. 

“The goal is low cost and low power,” he said.  “The question is how can we build this system without blowing the power budget.”

With that in mind, Intel will be delivering a paper on a 1.4 volt, 5Ghz, 4-channel multiple antenna receiver in 90nm CMOS for beamforming and special diversity applications.  Intel is using digital circuitry to assist the analog. And the company will perform interference cancellation on that single CMOS chip.

“We don’t use phase shifters,” said Soumyanath. “We get phase shifting by using digital techniques.”

Soumyanath said Intel is confident it can do up to four antennas on a laptop platform. In addition, he said that it will be easy to integrate this device with logic components in the next two to three years.

“We believe this solution anticipates the requirements of the next generation of wireless LAN,” he said.  “We see this as an intermediate step to software defined radios.”