Category Archives: Energy Efficiency

Electric Flight—the Ultimate Energy Efficiency Challenge

Posted on November 30, 2011 by John Donovan

If you think electric cars are impressive, how about an electric 747? On a smaller scale, that flight of fancy just became a reality. Last month in Santa Rosa, CA, an electric-powered 4-seat light plane won the NASA/Google Green Flight … Continue reading →

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Power Management in USB 3.0

Posted on March 1, 2011 by John Donovan

USB has become the most successful PC peripheral interconnect ever defined, with over 10 billion USB 2.0 products installed today. Still, despite its convenience, USB has never been either the fastest or the lowest-power interconnect protocol out there. USB 3.0 … Continue reading →

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How Will Consumers Benefit from the Smart Grid?

Posted on January 26, 2011 by John Donovan

George Arnold from NIST gave a talk with that title over lunch today at the Smart Energy Summit in Austin. The benefits of the Smart Grid may be obvious at NIST but they’re a lot less so to consumers. In … Continue reading →

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Ultra Low Power Electronics in the Next Decade

Posted on August 19, 2010 by John Donovan

As a TI Fellow and director of TI’s Kilby Research Labs, Ajith Amerasekera’s job is to predict the future and plot a roadmap to it. His keynote at day two of the low-power electronics show (ISLPED) in Austin—“Ultra Low Power … Continue reading →

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For Energy Efficiency, Forget Accuracy

Posted on August 18, 2010 by John Donovan

U.C. Berkeley professor Jan Rabaey kicked off the 2010 International Symposium on Low-Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED) today in Austin with a challenge to programmers, hardware designers and their EDA tool providers: The deterministic Turing model has hit the power … Continue reading →

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Designing With ARM—The Wrap-up

Posted on March 30, 2010 by John Donovan

Last week I co-chaired an EE Times virtual conference Designing with ARM: Engineering an Optimal ARM-Based System along with Rich Nass. This was my first experience with the format, and I went into it skeptical but with an open mind. … Continue reading →

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Vampires on a Diet

Posted on December 8, 2009 by John Donovan

In its current Technology Quarterly the Economist has a sidebar article on the impact of increased efficiency in power converters for portable electronics (aka “wall warts” or “energy vampires”). This is a drum we’ve been beating for years and a … Continue reading →

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Low-Power Design = Green Design

Posted on October 14, 2009 by John Donovan

The New York Times earlier this week 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 … Continue reading →

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Low-Power Design Has a High-Power Payoff

Posted on September 20, 2009 by John Donovan

The New York Times ran a story this morning that speaks directly to engineers involved in low-power design: Plugged-In Age Feeds a Hunger for Electricity. The message and the challenge are clear: “Electricity use from power-hungry gadgets is rising fast … Continue reading →

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