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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! | I'm very happy to announce that Robert Cravotta has joined Low-Power Design as a contributing editor. Robert has a lot to contribute, being one of the real thought leaders in the embedded space.
During his many years at EDN Robert covered technical trends in embedded processing; developed EDN's annual Microprocessor and DSP Directories; and ran their Embedded Processing and The Embedded Master blogs. Robert will be continuing the hands-on articles he wrote at EDN. This month he's starting a series on user interfaces--touchscreens and voice recognition in particular--evaluating development kits from a variety of vendors.
Check out Robert's blog post starting below, then please join us in welcoming him aboard.
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John Donovan
|  Low-Power Design Goes Wireless!
We've been covering low-power wireless from the beginning--actually for many years before Low-Power Design started up. Starting in May--in anticipation of the IEEE MTT International Microwave Symposiumin Anaheim from May 23-28--Low-Power Design is launching a new Low-Power Wireless web site. It will closely resemble Low-Power Design but be focused exclusively on RF/wireless design. More...
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Brian Fuller
|  Idea bloomThe Silicon Valley's profound change is reflected in the engineering diaspora, which has grown since the economy tanked in 2008. Collapsing financials met with demographic trends (older, more expensive engineers easier to cut from the payroll) to create a nasty wake-up call for our innovation nation. But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral: Re-energization. More... |
Steve Leibson
|  Tabula FPGA Scatters Logic, Memory, and Power Across Space and Time
Here's a head-scratcher for you. Why not create tesseract FPGAs? A tesseract is the 4-dimensional version of a 3D cube. If you fold an FPGA into time, you can extrude some of the physical computational circuitry into elsewhen and reduce the amount of circuitry needed to implement your functions. And that is exactly what the new FPGA vendor Tabula has done. More...
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Robert Cravotta
|  User Interfaces: Introduction
The pursuit of better user interfaces constantly spawns new innovative ideas to make it easier for a user to correctly, consistently, and unambiguously direct the behavior of a machine. For this series, I propose to explore logical and direct as two user interface categories. Both categories are complex enough to warrant a full discussion on their own. More...
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ISLPED 2010
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 | Power Saving Measures for Programmable Logic Designers
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 Squeezing every last microwatt from a system is a common objective for engineers who are designing battery operated equipment. This article examines design methods and practical advice for saving power. Since modern programmable logic devices (PLDs) have very low dynamic current requirements, often in the microampere range, they are ideal as system event monitors to control overall system wake/sleep states. More... |
New System Partitioning
|  Cell phones, portable navigation devices and portable media players are built around one main host processor that acts as the brain of the device and runs all the software needed to make the product work, such as audio and video streaming or Internet connections. Implementing a novel system partitioning, in such a way that not everything is controlled by these processors, can help reduce the development time. 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... |
Model-Based Design Accelerates Functional Verification
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 Functional verification consumes from 50% to 65% of the development time and budget for today's system-on-chip (SoC) projects. With fragmented tools and development methodologies that rely on manual scripting, collections of disparate verification tools, inter-tool incompatibilities with almost-standard transaction languages, and mismatched database sources, functional verification can itself become a project that deflects attention from the main development goals. Instead of optimizing and debugging product designs, engineers spend time debugging their workflow and compensating for gaps in their verification tool chain. More... |
DSPs Vs. FPGAs: Is There a Superior Choice for Portable Designs?
|  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 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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