Category Archives: Energy Efficiency

Solar is only part of the solution

Posted on August 9, 2012 by John Donovan

I’m a big fan of solar energy but also a realist, so I’ve long taken a skeptical view of claims that renewable energy sources—solar in particular—will obviate the need for more (hopefully fairly clean) fossil fuel power plants. A new … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy Efficiency, Solar, Wind power | 2 Comments

Verifying the Cloud

Posted on July 12, 2012 by John Donovan

So called “cloud computing” is the presumptive wave of the future, and not just to deliver software-as-a-service (SAAS), which will certainly challenge Microsoft’s business model. The ‘cloud’ is of course all those mainframes that Amazon, Google, Rackspace and others use … Continue reading →

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Low Power to the People!

Posted on May 30, 2012 by John Donovan

No, this isn’t another of Donovan’s rants, it’s a DAC Pavilion Panel on low-power design that I’ll be moderating on Monday morning. Here’s your chance to grill the gurus–well, three of them anyway–on numerous aspects of low-power design. It’s in … Continue reading →

Posted in DAC, EDA, Energy Efficiency, Microcontrollers, Power management | Leave a comment

Electric Flight—the Ultimate Energy Efficiency Challenge

Posted on November 30, 2011 by John Donovan

If you think electric cars are impressive, how about an electric 747? On a smaller scale, that flight of fancy just became a reality. Last month in Santa Rosa, CA, an electric-powered 4-seat light plane won the NASA/Google Green Flight … Continue reading →

Posted in Clean energy, Electric flight, Energy Efficiency | Leave a comment

Power Management in USB 3.0

Posted on March 1, 2011 by John Donovan

USB has become the most successful PC peripheral interconnect ever defined, with over 10 billion USB 2.0 products installed today. Still, despite its convenience, USB has never been either the fastest or the lowest-power interconnect protocol out there. USB 3.0 … Continue reading →

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How Will Consumers Benefit from the Smart Grid?

Posted on January 26, 2011 by John Donovan

George Arnold from NIST gave a talk with that title over lunch today at the Smart Energy Summit in Austin. The benefits of the Smart Grid may be obvious at NIST but they’re a lot less so to consumers. In … Continue reading →

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Ultra Low Power Electronics in the Next Decade

Posted on August 19, 2010 by John Donovan

As a TI Fellow and director of TI’s Kilby Research Labs, Ajith Amerasekera’s job is to predict the future and plot a roadmap to it. His keynote at day two of the low-power electronics show (ISLPED) in Austin—“Ultra Low Power … Continue reading →

Posted in Batteries, Clean energy, Energy Efficiency, Power management, semiconductors | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

For Energy Efficiency, Forget Accuracy

Posted on August 18, 2010 by John Donovan

U.C. Berkeley professor Jan Rabaey kicked off the 2010 International Symposium on Low-Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED) today in Austin with a challenge to programmers, hardware designers and their EDA tool providers: The deterministic Turing model has hit the power … Continue reading →

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Designing With ARM—The Wrap-up

Posted on March 30, 2010 by John Donovan

Last week I co-chaired an EE Times virtual conference Designing with ARM: Engineering an Optimal ARM-Based System along with Rich Nass. This was my first experience with the format, and I went into it skeptical but with an open mind. … Continue reading →

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Vampires on a Diet

Posted on December 8, 2009 by John Donovan

In its current Technology Quarterly the Economist has a sidebar article on the impact of increased efficiency in power converters for portable electronics (aka “wall warts” or “energy vampires”). This is a drum we’ve been beating for years and a … Continue reading →

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