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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:
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| Greetings! |
David JC McKay's book Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air is a "must read" (Science Magazine) for anyone concerned with how and to what extent alternative energy technologies are practical alternatives to coal, oil and gas.
"I'm concerned about cutting UK emissions of twaddle - twaddle about sustainable energy. ...This is a straight-talking book about the numbers. The aim is to guide the reader around the claptrap to actions that really make a difference and to policies that add up."
McKay's book is available online or as a free download at http://www.withouthotair.com/.
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John Donovan
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 Narrowbanding
A fellow ham operator who, like me, is involved in emergency communications, forward an article that Glen Bischoff of Urgent Communications magazine just published titled What to Do About Narrowbanding? I've been too focused on short-range wireless to have followed this, but no longer. More...
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Brian Fuller
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Actel's John East Announces RetirementWhen I heard late last week that John East, former AMD executive and for the past four decades the CEO of FPGA vendor Actel Corp., was retiring, well naturally I had a few thoughts. The first was "selfish bugger!" The second was, "Damn, I'm getting old, and I've been in this industry waaayyyy too long." More... |
Steve Leibson
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 Designing Low-Power Systems With FPGAs
Last week at the Real Time Embedded Computing Conference held in Santa Clara, California, Xilinx's Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development Vin Ratford did more than telegraph his company's intent to put processor cores back into FPGAs. He announced and elaborated on that intent. Xilinx will be adopting the ARM architecture and an FPGA-friendly version of ARM's AMBA interconnect in future FPGA generations. More...
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ISLPED 2010
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Designing Low-Cost Single/Multi-Cell Li-ION Battery Chargers
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 Li-ION rechargeable batteries, with a projected yearly market growth rate of approximately 20%, are widely used in smart phones, portable media players, and digital still cameras. This battery type is widely adopted because of its high energy density on both gravimetric and volumetric basis, low self discharge rate, and low maintenance. Li-Ion batteries are also lighter in weight than NiCad and NiMH batteries. More... |
Reducing Power with Advanced Clock Tree Synthesis and Optimization
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 Clock trees pose a growing challenge to advanced node IC design, particularly with regard to the chip power consumption. Clocks are the single largest source of dynamic power usage, which makes clock tree synthesis (CTS) and optimization as a good place to achieve significant power savings. It has become essential to have a power-aware, multi-corner multi-mode (MCMM) CTS with smart clock gate handling, slew shaping, register clumping, and other advanced techniques for reducing power, skew, area, and buffer count. More... |
Five Tips for Reducing Light Load Power Consumption
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 It can be quite a challenge to meet today's mandated efficiency requirements for power supplies. Just understanding the requirements is difficult enough, thanks to the dizzying array of initiatives and directives that vary by end equipment, power level, and governing authority. However, after a quick glance at any of these the energy conservation initiatives, it becomes clear that one of the greatest challenges for the power supply designer is to minimize the power loss at light loads and no load. Here are five ways to remove those last few milliwatts from an offline flyback supply. More... |
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. Whether implemented using digital or analog technologies, voltage supervisors mitigate the conflict between performance and low power in multiple power rail devices. More... |
Putting Intelligence in 'Bricks'
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 While software defined radios have added significant flexibility to public safety portable radios, the next step in the progression of capabilities is to add cognitive capabilities to public safety portables. A radio is considered cognitive if it is aware of its environment and internal state and can make decisions about its radio operating behavior based on that information and predefined objectives. More... |
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That's a brief look at what we have to offer--and we're adding 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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