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Low-Power Design
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 Welcome to Low-Power Design, your engineering portal into the world of
green/low-power design. We create, aggregate and deliver the latest
design news and articles to help power the green revolution.
Check out our many sections:
And our informative, opinionated blogs:
Please get in touch if you'd like to write for us or advertise with us.
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Greetings!
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In his keynote address to the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in
2007, Al Gore told design engineers that they're the key to a green
future. Smart embedded devices, he challenged them, could have an
enormous impact on overall energy consumption-and it was up to them to
design them. This site is devoted to helping engineers do exactly that.
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John Donovan
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The RF Challenge in Portable Designs
In simpler times most designs were digital. Add a few converters to
handle I/O and you could ship the product. Consumer electronics-and
cell phones in particular-changed all that. Now there are few consumer
designs that don't involve a large analog/mixed-signal component as
well as multiple RF chains. Adding a few ADCs and DACs to the signal
path isn't enough; the three worlds are now heavily intertwined. More...
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Brian Fuller
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Razors and BladesRecent stories and data suggest we may be now bumping along the bottom of a very long road to recovery. Dylan McGrath at EE Times reports that
EDA revenue, while down in Q1, was influenced by a Cadence accounting
change. More...
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Steve Leibson
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Free Pass to DAC Exhibits, All Week Long
Are
you an EDA user with a hankering to attend DAC in a couple of weeks but
don't have the dough-re-mi and your company won't spring for such a
"frill" this year? Recently laid off as an EDA user? Denali, Atrenta,
and Springsoft want to make you an offer you can't refuse: a
full-week's pass to DAC exhibits in exchange for a bit of information
from you. More...
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ARM Techcon3 -- October 21-23, 2009
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The Design and Verification Challenge for the Next Decade
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"The real world is analog and computers are digital."
These nine words set the stage for the great circuit design challenges
of the next decade. To quote G. Dan Hutchenson, president of VLSI
Research, "Virtual reality is possible only with mixed-signal chips,"
and of course, every designer on the planet, from the creators of
advanced weaponry to smart phones and cars that nearly drive
themselves, is hot on the trail of virtual reality. More... |
Intelligent Integration of the CDMA RF Front End
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Today's mobile devices are quite complex, with many RF radios packed
into an ever shrinking footprint. How to pack more radio components
into less space? Shrinking the individual radio components is the
obvious one, while integration of the individual parts is the other.
The reasons for integration have been well documented. Besides the
actual space savings, there is also improved performance and simplified
design resulting in faster time-to-market. If there was a 'holy grail'
here it would be a single plug-and-play module containing the entire RF
front end that customers can just drop onto their PC boards. More...
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Non-Volatile Memory Options in Portable Designs
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The number of functions being demanded by consumers in portable devices
is growing every day. Gone are the days when it was acceptable to have
separate devices providing voice access, email and web access, music,
video, and gaming. As the number of features and functions embedded
into portable devices increases, so does the need for embedded
non-volatile memory (NVM). More...
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It's a Mixed-Signal World
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It's often said that most of today's designs are mixed signal, and that
mixed-signal verification remains one of the biggest design challenges.
A typical chip design today is a complete system with millions of gates
that make up large numbers of DSPs, memories and processors, all of
which must interface with the real world through displays, antennas,
sensors, and cables. This requires unprecedented integration of analog and
digital content, without compromising performance or size, and on a
technology scale that dramatically increases vulnerability to process
and electrical variation. More... |
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How Analog and Digital Designing Differs
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The basic difference between the analog versus digital mind set is
embedded in the definitions of precision, hardware versus software, and
time. When it comes to precision, the issues you might be concerned
about would be how well your analog devices are matched to your task at
hand, or how efficiently your software executes to digital code. Analog
engineers quickly recognize that hardware changes are difficult, while
digital engineers make software changes with a few computer key
strokes. Then, there is the issue of time. In analog design,
frequency dominates the designer's decisions. And in digital design,
the elapsed time plays a prominent role. More...
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Voltage Supervisors Pull Multiple Duties
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The
market drives digital signal processor (DSP), microcontroller and field
programmable gate array (FPGA) manufacturers to continually increase
clock frequencies for higher performance while, at the same time, also
demanding lower power consumption. These two opposing criteria led to
the development of multiple power rail devices.
More...
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That's a brief look at what we have to offer--and we're adding a lot more every day. Please check back with us regularly to get the latest news, tips and techniques for implementing green/low-power designs.
Sincerely,
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