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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! | While it's rewarding to write about the trends and techniques, products and projects that enable energy-efficient design, some of us miss doing what our readers do--designing and prototyping our own projects.
Robert Cravotta has always kept an oscilloscope near his writing desk, documenting his Hands On projects for EDN over the years. He continues that tradition at Low-Power Design, with a new series evaluating touch development kits. Check out Robert's current installment below.
Firing up my own 'scope, spectrum analyzers, function generator, et al, I've decided to have some fun and evaluate low-power development kits. I've currently got dev kits on hand from Microchip, TI, ADI, SiLabs, Atmel, IAR and Ettus Research and ask that you send in one if you'd like it to be reviewed. I'll shortly be writing up my work with the low-power kits on Low-Power Design and the RF dev kits on Low-Power Wireless (www.low-powerwireless.com), which launches on May 21. Stay tuned.
--John Donovan, Editor/Publisher, Low-Power Publications
www.low-powerdesign.com
www.low-powerwireless.com
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John Donovan
|  Need IP? Buy Me!
Hampered by its former financial problems, Cadence is playing catch-up in the acquisitions game. The Denali 'merger' makes a lot of sense, adding the industry's leading memory models and IP to Cadence's product offerings. With only $43 million in annual revenues but a 30% operating margin, Denali was a prime acquisition target. My only question is why no one bought them sooner. More...
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Brian Fuller
|  Time (and technology) fliesWhat frustrates me about the state of today's media--of today's "conversation"--is how negative the scenarios are in any situation. This is perhaps a function of human nature, flight-or-fight, in which we default, for safety's sake, to consider the worst possible outcome (my favorite company will go bankrupt; he'll strike out with runners in scoring position) when assessing situations. In reality, however, the worst scenario rarely emerges. More... |
Steve Leibson
|  Xilinx redefines the high-end microcontroller
Two features of Xilinx's EPP architecture differentiate it from other microcontrollers. The first, discussed in Part 1, is the presence of a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor. Most microcontrollers contain only one processor core. The EPP has two. So it's already starting from a high-end position. The second differentiating feature is the inclusion of an unidentified amount of FPGA fabric on the device. More...
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Robert Cravotta
|  User Interfaces: Test Bench and Process for Projects
I have several goals when I perform this kind of hands-on project. First and foremost, I want to understand the state-of-the-art for touch development kits. Each company is serving this market from a slightly different angle, and their board and software support reflects different design trade-offs. I believe uncovering those trade-offs will provide you with better insight into how each kit can best meet your needs in your own touch projects. More...
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Global Technology Congress
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Making Sense of Data Management on Intelligent Devices
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 Developers face unique challenges when designing and implementing software for custom embedded hardware. Embedded processor architectures, such as ARM, PowerPC, Atom, each have unique characteristics. Footprint and performance are especially important, and access to source code for all software components is required for customization and portability. More... |
Personal Training: 32 Bits at a Time
|  These devices have traditionally been data mining devices which relied on an application running on a personal computer to analyze the data and return the runner's performance results. Now, by utilizing 32-bit microcontrollers designers are able to efficiently perform the necessary on-board calculations to give athlete's direct and immediate feedback to motivate and enhance the workout. More...
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Advanced Dynamic Voltage Scaling
|  In today's applications dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) means either optimizing battery lifetime in portable applications, or saving energy and reducing heat in complex, multiprocessor environments. The latest generation of power management components offers several options for implementing selectable output voltages. Linear regulators (LDOs), DC/DC converters with integrated power FETs, as well as highly integrated multichannel power management units, are capable of voltage scaling with integrated DVS. More... |
Smart Battery Management Considerations for Portable Applications
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 Traditionally, many designers believed battery optimization could be achieved using a standardized smart battery that includes all the necessary electronics to monitor itself and communicate to the greater system. However, today, the smart battery concept defines interfaces, a data set and behaviors of the smart battery, battery selector, smart charger and host elements in a smart battery system. More... |
Solve Portable Design Problems Using Convenient Concurrency
|  Thinking about applying such SMP architectures to portable systems immediately draws attention to a tool problem: practical software-development tools that can automatically distribute a large, single-threaded application across many processors are simply not available. While hardware-description languages such as Verilog easily express parallel operations, software languages such as C, the current king of embedded software languages, are specifically designed to express single-threaded algorithms. A dilemma. 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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