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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.

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!
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 Out of a Job? Create One!
Despite all of the hullabaloo about health care reform, I propose that the number one problem we're facing right now is jobs-rather, the lack of them. The real value in any product-from chip to box-is the innovative design that goes into it. But how do you realize that value if you have a great idea but no employer to pay you to develop it? Go into business for yourself. More...
Brian Fuller
Brian Fuller
How Low Can You Go?
That's the theme of much of today's system design as it pertains to power, or energy efficiency or green engineering or any related moniker you care to use. All the cool kids in Silicon Valley will be lining up this week to watch the latest low-power limbo dancing at the 14th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design in Millbrae, just south of San Francisco. More...
Steve Leibson
Steve Leibson Could A Low-Power Middle Ground Between ASICs/SOCs and FPGAs Help You?
"You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime
You'll find
You get what you need."

Those lyrics from a song from the Rolling Stones describes the situation with ASICs/SOCs and FPGAs. For low power, you want an ASIC or SOC. However, there are huge obstacles to using an ASIC or SOC. More...
ARM Techcon3 -- October 21-23, 2009
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Not Just A Mathematical Symbol: A Deeper Look At The "+" Of HSPA+
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While the "+" brings many exciting advancements to the table, what exactly does it mean for handset requirements and overall cost? Additional antennas, multiple receive and transmit channels in the digital baseband (DBB), enhanced handset memory and more complex communication algorithms are just some requirements needed to drive HSPA+ to its full potential. Other features of the standard drastically alter handset cost, size and power consumption as well. More...
RF Power Measurement Techniques for Portable Systems
Dvorkin figure 4 With everything today going wireless, RF power measurement is rapidly becoming a necessity. This article highlights many useful techniques for measuring RF signal levels accurately in order to optimize the performance of these wireless systems. The article discusses the optimal approach for varying application requirements. More...
Reducing Power in Video-Intensive Portable Applications
Despite the consumer's seemingly insatiable desire for video-rich applications, minimizing power consumption and maximizing battery life remain absolute requirements for portable mobile devices.  Navigating these conflicting objectives requires a holistic, comprehensive approach to saving power.  Portable designers must deploy power saving-techniques throughout the design flow to achieve both standby and active power requirements. More...
Open UPF/IEEEp1801 Standard Roadmap for Next Generation Power-Managed SoC Design
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The global energy and climate crises that have gained significant awareness over the past six to eight years have "fueled" the emergence of so-called "green" technology initiatives in several key markets, most notably the information technology sector. Semiconductor component power consumption represents problematic challenges that include: mega-server farms consuming hundreds of megawatts, handheld consumer devices, and physical device scaling below 45nm semiconductor process nodes. The result has been a newfound awareness that "off-by-default" may become the mantra for next-generation semiconductor design practice. More...
DSPs Vs. FPGAs: Is there a superior choice for portable design?
ON semi graphic Today, FPGAs have matured to the point where they can be effectively applied to signal processing tasks, a domain that has recently belonged only to DSPs. What are today's designers of portable electronics to make of the convergence of these technologies in the signal processing space? What is the better solution? More...
Maximize Range in Mobile Handsets with CMOS-on-Sapphire RF Switches
Kelly graphic Mobile handsets need to include many high-selectivity filters in order to accommodate the growing number of frequency bands that must be handled by today's portable multimedia devices. Each handset generation has supported more frequencies, so the number of filters has grown, forcing designers to add switching elements in order to optimize the link budget.
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