How Effective Power Management Increases The Lifetime Operation Of Portable Medical Devices


To enable remote patient care and provide increased mobility in hospital settings portable medical devices, Personal Area Networks (PANs), and home health systems are seeing a significant increase in investment spending. When designing a portable medical device, decisions on processor and component selection are dependent on a range of variables which include performance, price, quality, and re... » read more

Power IS Top Priority, Isn’t It?


While I don’t mean to start a battle – or maybe I do! – I heard something last week during DAC that gave me pause. The person I was speaking with – who told me they ‘got in a little bit of trouble’ for saying this – reminded me of an interesting subject we had talked about previously, namely, that they did not believe power is the number one concern of engineering teams today. Ye... » read more

Power Management Techniques For Smart Grid Devices


Energy efficiency is a top concern among developers building connected devices for the smart grid. Initially, the application-centric approach to building a device was used. But today, with sophisticated hardware power management features available on most modern processors, this is no longer the case. What’s needed is an OS-level approach that allows developers to take advantage of the full ... » read more

Mostly Accurate Computing


“Approximate computing” is a new concept in computers, allowing them to perform calculations for certain tasks that don’t require perfect accuracy with the goal of improving efficiency and reducing energy consumption. But do the concepts apply when it comes to managing power? And is there a philosophical approach when it comes to thinking about power management? To a large extent, that... » read more

Simple Does Not Mean Easy


When it comes to chip design we speak constantly about managing complexity - how best to architect for it, how to manage it, what design techniques to use, what the impact on the system will be etc. - but we don't speak too much about making the design more simple. Instead, we heap on more complexity to manage the complexity. As with everything else in life it seems just because something is... » read more

On-Chip MCUs Excel At Power Management


By Ann Steffora Mutschler When it comes to supplying power to an SoC, there is an increasing trend to make it more intelligent—how to control it more accurately, how it is monitored and how it communicates with different aspects of the chip. Traditional power supply models with analog supplies have less of this control, so a number of engineering teams are considering the use of on-chip m... » read more

Experts At The Table: Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss power format changes with Sushma Hoonavera-Prasad, design engineer in Broadcom’s mobile platform group; John Biggs, consultant engineer for R&D and co-founder of ARM; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence; and Jeffrey Lee, corporate ap... » read more

Too Big To Handle?


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the insatiable demand for power efficiency today, the power management tasks have been pushed up into the realm of the software engineer due to the sheer complexity of the hardware design and the demands on the hardware designer to get their part right. Managing power properly in embedded software boils down to really understanding the application and how it i... » read more

Life After Smartphones


By Frank Ferro Don’t let the title confuse you. Smartphones are not going away anytime soon. In fact this year’s smartphone shipments have exceeded feature phones for the first time, with a total of 216 million units in Q1, according to IDC, and the overall mobile phone market is expected to grow 4.3% in 2013. This volume represents an increase in smartphone sales of 42% from Q1 2012. ... » read more

Power? It’s The Apps, Stupid!


Shabtay Matalon When I bought my first iPhone, I envisioned using it mostly to make phone calls and occasionally to view e-mails and browse the Web. For navigation, I used a separate GPS. But all this changed when I realized that I can use the Waze App on my iPhone for real-time navigation or to play games while listening to music on a boring coast-to-coast domestic flight. These new “apps�... » read more

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