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 market we serve. While our focus is still semiconductors, the stories we write range from deep technology within the chips to the causes and effects of lowering power—everything from macroeconomics and politics to atomic physics.

Reducing the voltage in a device cannot be viewed in a vacuum. It can affect everything from the delivery of power within that device to a battery’s voltage regulators and the overall return on investment for a chip company—fabless or IDM. Increasing densities has marked effects on single-event upsets. And demands in the data center may have a significant impact on the overall utilization of a processor’s cores and the memory structures within or outside of those processors.

These issues have a significant impact on decisions about how many power islands need to be created, how many cores should be added to the chip and whether they should be homogeneous or heterogeneous, and how all of this affects throughput and leakage. These are complex engineering decisions, and they stretch from outside the semiconductor to deep within and back again. Designs have to be validated and verified, and everyone needs to understand the tradeoffs and the context in which decisions are made.

We fully intend to cover these subjects the way we always have, in keeping with good journalistic principles—unbiased, well researched, well written and fiercely independent. But we also need to provide a better description of what we’re all about. Check out our new url, too. (www.lowpowerengineering.com).