The Engineer's Portal to Green Design

The New York Times recently carried a story on how energy consumption by data centers is becoming a major and measurable problem worldwide:

"In the United States alone, those data centers accounted for 1.5 percent of the country’s electricity use in 2006 — more than the entire state of Massachusetts. And their power use could nearly double over five years, according to government reports."

Low-Power Design deliberately picked up the torch from Portable Design, which was all about energy efficient design. Looking at the macro-level implications—as evidenced by the data center example above—we realized that “green engineering” is all about creating energy-efficient designs. The power management techniques first developed for portable devices apply equally well to their plugged-in brethren. Now we won’t ignore you if your product doesn’t run off a battery. In fact you get bonus points if it uses less power than the state of Massachusetts (Rhode Island, even)!

Green engineering isn’t just good design, it can also save your customers a lot of green–as in money.

We cover the green angle in our news section in order to increase our readers’ awareness of the importance of the work they’re doing. But at heart we’re a design book, trying to provide the tools to help our readers get the job done.

Low-power design is the key to a green future, and it’s what Low-Power Design is all about. Each day we’ll bring you the latest news—both staff written and aggregated from leading sources around the world—as well as in-depth design articles to help make your next device as energy efficient as possible. Our various blogs let you converse directly with our editors--the ex-Editors and Editors-in-Chief of Portable Design and EDN.

Our goal is to be the Engineer’s Portal to Green Design. You’re engineering the future, and we’re here to help.

Who We Are

John Donovan, Editor-in-Chief

John Donovan is ex-Editor-in-Chief of Portable Design, Managing Editor of EDN Asia and Asian editor of Circuits Assembly and Printed Circuit Fabrication. He has 25 years experience as a technical writer, editor and semiconductor PR flack, having survived earlier careers as a C programmer and microwave technician. John has published two books, dozens of manuals and hundreds of articles. He is a member the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a Senior Member of the IEEE. His favorite pastimes include ham radio, playing with his kids and scouting Texas for the best BBQ joints.

Steve Leibson, Contributing Editor

An experienced hardware and software design engineer, engineering manager, and design consultant, Steve Leibson has also been Editor-in-Chief of both EDN and the Microprocessor Report and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Embedded Developers Journal. Steve spent 10 years working at electronic systems companies (HP’s Desktop Computer Division, Auto-Trol Technology, Cadnetix) before donning his editor’s hat for the next 15. Most recently, he spent eight years as Tensilica's Technology Evangelist and Strategic Marketing Manager, where he published hundreds of articles and spoke at conferences around the country.

Robert Cravotta, Contributing Editor

Robert Cravotta is the principal analyst at Embedded Insights. He has been following and commenting on the embedded processing space including microprocessors, microcontrollers, digital signal processors (DSPs), multiprocessor architectures, processor fabrics, coprocessors, and accelerators, plus embedded cores in FPGAs, SOCs, and ASICs since 2001. Robert's embedded engineering background includes research and development in path-finding avionics, power and laser control systems, autonomous vehicles, and vision sensing systems. Robert's unique work products while at EDN include the Embedded Processing blog and companion guest blog; the Microprocessor and DSP Directories, annual Hands-on projects, and articles about technical trends in the embedded processing space. Robert is currently posting about issues affecting embedded designers at The Embedded Master micro-site at EDN.

Brian Dipert, Contributing Editor

Brian Dipert has a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. His professional career began at Magnavox Electronics Systems in Fort Wayne, IN, where he worked for an aggregate 2.5 years as a co-op engineer while obtaining his degree.

Brian subsequently spent eight years at Intel Corporation in Folsom, CA, holding a variety of technical marketing, applications, product architecture and chip design roles in the company's nonvolatile memory group, supporting both EPROMs and flash memory both as an individual contributor and in management. During this time, Brian also authored and co-authored four technical reference guides published by Annabooks Press. He then spent 14 years (and five months) at EDN Magazine; at the conclusion of his career there, he was the senior technical editor covering consumer electronics-targeted ICs, software and subsystems. Along the way his 'beat' also encompassed programmable logic devices and design software, along with innumerable other technologies (and products based on them).

Brian's off-hours interests include reading (a variety of genres and topics), photography, music, high-altitude mountaineering, and trekking. In the winter time, he downhill skis, cross-country skis, and snowshoes. And when the snow melts, he redirects his energy towards road and mountain biking, hiking, and long distance running. Befitting his outdoors pursuits, his home-based office is located at 7,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, above Truckee, CA in the northwest corner of Lake Tahoe.