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.
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