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More power, less consumption
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28/03/2006
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The biggest challenge for developers of battery powered portable devices is achieving a balance between increasing functionality and higher power requirements whilst dealing with limited power resources. This not only applies to consumer applications, such as mobile phones and digital cameras, but also increasingly to industrial applications, such as portable industrial computers.
With battery power unlikely to increase significantly in the foreseeable future, what is needed are comprehensive power management strategies to minimise the energy requirement of the largest power consumers, such as processors and displays, whilst optimising their performance.
The latest trend for portable multimedia players is towards video functionality. Generally speaking, this requires more cpu power and therefore an increase in power consumption. Processing a video in vga resolution at 24frame/s in Mpeg4 format requires at least a 700MHz microcontroller. Other standard formats, such as DivX and H.264, require significantly more processing power. Even at a quarter of the resolution, standard Mpeg4 videos need at least 233MHz.
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Author
Andreas Biß, Sven Stegemann and Gunter Wagschal
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