Environmental issues continue to highlight
the agendas of design strategy
meetings. But it’s no longer just about
“getting the lead out.” Now the focus is
on optimizing energy efficiency in new
chip and system designs.
Increasingly, the world’s leading companies
are acknowledging that power
matters. As a result, companies are aggressively making a conscious
effort to address tight power budgets and significantly
reduce power consumption.
“Things are definitely changing,” says Martin Mason, Actel’s
senior director of silicon marketing. “The industry is starting
to get religious about environmental
issues,” he said, and that includes turning
out more power-efficient, smallform-
factor devices.
Mason says the electronics industry
should be concerned with the watthour
(WH), not just the kilowatt hour.
“The watt-hour is a very interesting
concept, and we don’t [as an industry]
pay a lot of attention to it,” he said.
“We tend to talk about kilowatt-hours,
and that’s important for space heaters
and large appliances. But when you
start talking about the millions, if not
billions, of electronic devices out there
that are consuming a watt at a time, a
watt-year makes a great deal of sense
and it becomes important.”
M
ason’s Dell PC has two batteries that consume 48 WH
and 53 WH, respectively, for a total capacity of about 100 WH.
In normal operation, the computer lasts about two hours on a
full charge, so it takes about 50 watts per hour to run. If Mason
were to leave his laptop on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, he’d
use 438,000 WH (or 438 kilowatt-hours) of electricity annually.
At a cost of 14.33 cents per kilowatt-hour in his home
state of California, laptop use alone costs him $62 per year.
In everyday terms, the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency says 11% to 13% of the average American household’s
electric bill comes out of consumer electronic product use. The
EPA expects that to climb to 18% by 2015. But with more
home builders consulting with retailers and custom installers
on home technologies, including home networks that are being
heavily promoted by the Consumer Electronics Association
(CEA), consumer consumption of energy from electronic
products could easily top EPA estimates.
POWER-MANAGEMENT SURGES
Because of the growing demand for portable electronics, market
research firm iSuppli expects the worldwide power-management
semiconductor market to expand significantly during
the next few years—from $24.98 billion in 2006 to $39.9
billion in 2011. Semiconductors in this segment include voltage
regulators, power-management application-specific integrated
circuits (ASICs), application-specific standard products
(ASSPs), rectifiers, thyristors, and power transistors.
“What we need to do as an industry,”
says Mason, “is to come up with smart
ways to power our products down when
there’s no load involved.” Consumers
seem to agree. A recent study of U.S.
consumers by research firm Forrester
Research found that 12% are willing to
spend more for electronic products that
use less energy or employ an environmentally
conscious design.
In fact, standby power consumption
has already begun to decrease. That’s
due, in large part, to the success of voluntary
government-industry programs
such as Energy Star, coupled with
technological innovation.
Mason would like to see the EPA
establish industry standards for semiconductor
power consumption under the Energy Star label. “It
would help educate consumers on the impact of the products
they’re buying with an industry-wide program,” he says, noting
that Actel has already discussed this idea with Energy Star
offices in the San Francisco area.
What power savings are possible? LCDs in portable devices
are a good example, consuming up to 50% of the application’s
power budget. Actel says its new IGLOO video demo board,
LCD adaptor board with LCD panels, and video demo kits
consume as little as 5 µW while retaining the contents of the
system memory and data registers.
As a result, the flash-based IGLOO field-programmable
gate array (FPGA) can enable both the LCD panel and controller
to function in a power-saving mode and the LCD data and backlighting to be disabled. This creates
a significant battery savings for LCD
applications.
Continue on Page 2