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Low-Power Design
Wind Turbine 175x115Welcome 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.

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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!
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.
John Donovan
John Donovan What's In a Chip? Reverse Engineer It to Find Out
I had an interesting meeting at DAC with Julia Elvidge, the president of Chipworks. Chipworks reverse engineers chips to find out exactly what makes them tick. I must admit I've long associated reverse engineering with shady operators who'd rather knock off your chip than invest in the R&D to develop their own. While not denying that's been known to happen, Julia proceeded to educate me to the legitimate uses of reverse engineering. More...
Brian Fuller
Brian Fuller
It's All in the Mind
The summer's usually slow, but I wasn't prepared for what I felt when the taxi came to a halt on Howard Street. I'd just gotted off a plane from Denver, jumped in a cab to San Francisco and pulled up at the Moscone Convention Center. I thought for a moment that perhaps the 46th Design Automation Conference was being held somewhere else. I could see no signage and there was no one milling about outside. It was a ghost town. More...
Steve Leibson
Steve Leibson Squeezing Excess Power Out of Synthesized Blocks
With the glacial-like industry move towards transaction-level simulation using OSCI's TLM 2.0, I think that C and SystemC will be used more and more for the initial descriptions of large portions of many systems. Many system blocks will therefore end up as compiled software (or firmware) running on standard-architecture processors and application-specific processors because it's just easier to compile such descriptions and run them on processors. C and SystemC are sequential languages and they just beg to be implemented as firmware running on a processor. More...
ARM Techcon3 -- October 21-23, 2009
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Multicore for Portables
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This is the Age of Multicore. After 40 years of surfing Moore's Law to greater and greater levels of performance, a few years ago the semiconductor industry finally started to hit some brick walls thrown up by simple physics. When at 32 nm static power becomes a more difficult problem than dynamic power, it's time to consider your options. More...
Spectrum Management
cell phone towers The immediate interest to regulators in fielding cognitive radios is to provide new capabilities that support new methods and mechanisms for spectrum access and utilization now under consideration by international spectrum regulatory bodies. These new methodologies recognize that fixed assignment of a frequency to one purpose across huge geographic regions (often across entire countries) is quite inefficient. More...
The Benefits of Single-Cell MCU Operation
silabs graphic Until recently, even the lowest voltage, lowest power MCUs on the market required a minimum supply of 1.8 Volts to operate - requiring at least two alkaline batteries in series for battery operation. However, a new MCU family now offers a minimum operating voltage of just 0.9 Volts - the end of life voltage of a single alkaline battery. More...
Energy Harvesting Widens Opportunities for Microbatteries
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Currently, most energy harvesting technologies are using battery back-up and are likely to for several years to come. Companies are trying to find appropriate energy storage alternatives to traditional batteries, however. Batteries are problematic for large-scale wireless applications. Today's cost premium is typically below what it costs to swap the battery one at a time, including battery cost, labor and so on. Over an expected lifetime of 15 years, a self-powered sensor could provide "significant" cost savings. More...
The Future of Ultra Wideband-The Shakeout Begins
USB cables Recently WiQuest-a leader in first-generation Ultra Wideband (UWB) silicon-closed its doors. One question that will surely be asked is, "What does this mean for the future of UWB?" Some industry pundits will proclaim that UWB is dead or that this is some form of setback to the industry. Not so. Those of us in the high tech business have seen this movie many times before. To really answer the question, we need to review history from two perspectives. First, why UWB makes sense, and second, what the history of new technologies teaches us. More...
Configurable Processors-Boon or Bane?
configurable processor When it comes to portable designs, it's hard to say which is moving faster, the market or the technology. Each year we see scores of new cell phone models introduced, most of which will disappear within six months-and all of which are the end product of a design process that started 12-18 months earlier. During that time audio, video and RF standards have continued to evolve and consumer tastes have remained on spin cycle. The chances that all of your original design decisions will turn out to be on the mark a year or two later are vanishingly small.
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,
 
John Donovan
Low-Power Design