Greener Data Centers


By Ed Sperling For decades the race inside the data center was all about performance. If you upgraded from an IBM Series/370 mainframe to a Series/380 your applications ran faster. And if you upgraded your PC server from a Pentium II to a Pentium 4 you got significantly better performance. The race now is to reduce the number of servers altogether, to lower the cooling costs per server ra... » read more

Differentiating Embedded Processors


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The embedded processor world addresses a vast range of applications – from the datacenter to the biomedical device – all of which have critical power needs that vary with the use. Power concerns continue to dominate the embedded system whether it is avoid a noisy fan in a TV set-top box, allow video on a mobile phone or minimize pricey cooling costs in the datac... » read more

A Noticeably Cooler Continental Climate


Nicolas Leterrier, chief representative of the Minalogic coordination unit, whose job is to oversee the “innovation cluster” in Grenoble, France, sat down with Low-Power Engineering to discuss the changes under way in Europe, what's driving it and where researchers in Grenoble see the future challenges. What follows are excerpts of that interview. By Ed Sperling LPE: Is the impetus fo... » read more

Meeting The Challenge Of Verification In Low-Power Designs


By Cheryl Ajluni Over the years, new techniques, technologies and design tools have been brought to market with the explicit intent of simplifying design verification. Despite these efforts verification still manages to consume a huge chunk of the time spent during design. By some accounts that number tops 70%. The problem is that verification is hard, and it certainly doesn’t get an easi... » read more

Hypervisors For Managing Power


By Ed Sperling Hypervisors are headed for a new role inside of multicore chips—managing the various power islands in addition to the cores. A patent application filed by IBM, entitled “Method and syarstem for hypervisor based power management,” shows the company’s intention to use hypervisors for everything from monitoring power consumption rates to scaling power for individual core... » read more

Power Trip Advisor


By Geoffrey James There’s never been a greater demand for power-efficient silicon. As consumer electronic devices get smaller, with increased functionality, battery power becomes a premium resource. At the same time, “Green IT” is a major corporate trend, and the best way to be environmentally sensitive (while saving on energy costs) is to buy technology that ekes the maximum computing o... » read more

Power Delivery Issues


By Ed Sperling Reducing the voltage in a system on chip is like turning down the water pressure on a home plumbing system. Pretty soon you find out that not all the faucets work properly because there isn’t enough pressure behind them. While it’s vital to drop the voltage to boost battery life in mobile devices, not to mention reduce the overall power consumption in plug-in devices, t... » read more

We Changed Our Name


Low-Power Design today changes its name to Low-Power Engineering reflecting a broader context for low-power issues that extend well beyond the confines of just design. We discovered the need for this change several months ago—and many stories after launching Low-Power Design. Polls of our readers and our sponsors, which we conduct on a regular basis, showed our name was too narrow for the ... » read more

Considerations For Choosing The Right Low-Power Tools


By Cheryl Ajluni Regardless of what you are designing these days, one fact holds true: Your design is only as good as the design tools you use. Gone are the days when a design could be done on the back of napkin. Today, engineers require a complex ecosystem of interworking tools to guide them through the complex design flow. This is especially true when it comes to low-power design, as i... » read more

End User Report: Reliability


John Kern, vice president of product operations inside Cisco Systems’ customer value chain management group, sat down with Low-Power Engineering to talk about the company’s internal focus on reliability and what factors are causing the most concern. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. By Ed Sperling LPE: How does Cisco gauge reliability? John Kern: The bulk of our re... » read more

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