Meerkat is a silicon telemetry solution enabling semiconductor companies to monitor the health of their products. A digital soft IP core, Meerkat in-situ monitoring platform can be automatically integrated into the logic blocks of any chip via standard cells and a set of provided scripts compatible with most EDA flows.
Meerkat is based on Dolphin’s patented setup slack monitor, the Slack Guard. The setup slack of a data path is defined as the difference between the required time and the actual time of the data arrival at the end point. A positive setup slack means that the logic is working at the specified frequency while having some margin for faster operation.
As the propagation speed of the data decreases with the supply voltage, the setup slack margin decreases accordingly. Hence, in the presence of supply voltage variations, an inappropriately low margin might translate into timing violation, potentially resulting in data corruption. Meerkat’s Slack Guards inform the host system of such risk by triggering alarm signals if the setup slack of the monitored end points becomes lower than a predefined threshold. The host system can then decide to raise its supply voltage to increase the setup slack margin – at the cost of higher power consumption.
At embedded world 2025, Dolphin Semiconductor will showcase how Meerkat enables a final product to achieve record levels of power-efficiency.
For more information, visit: https://dolphin-semiconductor.com/sensors/
The Electronics Excellence Awards ceremony will take place at embedded world on 12th March at 4.30pm at the Hall 3 Forum.
You’re all welcome to come and see which product will win!
