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Time to save power
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03/02/2005
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Battery life is a major design consideration for all consumer electronics products. With consumers, in general, looking to buy products that offer more features, yet have longer operating lives, designers are having to be more creative in the way they squeeze as much from the battery as possible.
One possible approach to the problem is to use ever more efficient power conversion and regulation components. But with the efficiencies in these devices now exceeding 90%, there is not a lot of room left here. Another approach is to take advantage of new fabrication processes. In general, the move to ever smaller features has brought the concomitant benefit of lower power consumption. But as components move to the 90nm node, physical effects such as leakage have somewhat negated these benefits.
What other approaches are possible, then? A promising avenue of research is asynchronous logic, where the performance of individual blocks of logic is decoupled from a global clock. Logic obviously consumes energy when it is switching on and off. If you turn the logic off when it isn’t needed, you save power. Academics like Professor Steve Furber of Manchester University, and companies such as the Philips’ spin out Handshake Solutions are making progress here.
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Author
Graham Pitcher
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