Are you a Power Smart Engineer?
Power in semiconductor devices takes two basic forms — static and dynamic. Static power is consumed when the part is doing no useful work, while dynamic power is consumed when devices are actively working.
Until recently, dynamic power has been the dominant source of power consumption. In the past, reduction of dynamic power has come from process shrinks and lower system voltages, but it seems we have reached the point of diminishing returns. With smaller process geometries, worsening leakage current causes static power to dominate the power consumption.
Now that the somewhat "easy" power gains of shrinking process have passed, we have the opportunity to find ever more creative ways to cut power. It is no longer up to just the semiconductor designer to create the power gains but up to each engineer to choose technology that allows better power choices at each level of design. Choosing the lowest power FPGA or choosing a device with built-in smarts to allow your system to manage power becomes another level of learning for the ever evolving design engineer.
Low Power Devices
Designers of portable, battery-powered equipment are faced with a daunting challenge — insatiable consumer demand for smaller, cheaper, feature-rich portable devices, with longer battery lives, lower cost, and short time-to-market. If the battery life of a smart phone is good for six hours and if lithium ion batteries typically support 300-500 recharge cycles, before a "costly" battery replacement is required, wouldn't these devices be even more attractive if the battery life was extended beyond six hours to weeks or months?
Compared with today's "low power" best-of-breed SRAM-based FPGAs, Actel's flash-based IGLOO FPGAs deliver between one hundred and one thousand times improvements in power consumption. Read more »
Power Smart Systems
Power smart chips offer more than just low-power consumption. They can be used to intelligently control and reduce total power consumption in the overall system. For example, the mixed-signal Actel Fusion® Programmable System Chip (PSC) offers the integration of FPGA logic with other elements used in system
management, such as flash, analog, microprocessors, and clock management. This integration enables designers to remove parts from the board, reducing total power consumption and bill of materials (BOM) costs, and enabling sophisticated power management of the system.
An off-the-shelf, flash-based, single-chip, field-programmable device implementation allows the designer to create a simple and inexpensive system management solution.
