http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson Leibson's Laws and the Penalties for Breaking Them Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:23:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Now it’s a trend. Last week, I wrote about the sub-$100, 2.5-inch, 32Gbyte SSD from OCZ. Now Intel makes low-cost SSDs a trend with the introduction of a $125 (when ordering 1000), 2.5-inch, 40Gbyte, “value” edition of its industry-leading X25 SSD, as reported by Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian. Intel's new X25-V ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/03/15/intel-releases-low-power-40gbyte-ssd-for-125/ Today’s San Jose Business Journal carries a story about Redwood Systems, a startup networking company in Fremont, California with a difference. Redwood is a smart-power networking company. Its Ethernet switches supply communications and power to end nodes and those nodes will be lighting fixtures and sensors, at first. Other things ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/03/13/redwood-systems-unstealths-power-over-ethernet-lighting-systems/ It was only a matter of time. Nobody doubts that solid-state disks (SSDs) will decline in price over time. The only questions are “How fast will prices fall?” and “How much storage will I get for my money”? PC component vendor OCZ contributed some answers to those questions yesterday by ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/03/12/ocz%e2%80%99s-32gbyte-onyx-ssd-breaks-100-barrier-cuts-power/ Wow. The Embedded World show in Nuremberg is really shaking the low-power microcontrollers out of the tree this year. Cases in point: announcements of new, low-power 8- and 32-bit microcontrollers from Microchip and Energy Micro (a Norwegian fabless microcontroller company) respectively. Microchip's 8-bit parts are offered in packages ranging from ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/03/05/it%e2%80%99s-raining-low-power-microcontrollers/ Last week, I moderated a Power-Over-Ethernet (POE) session at the Ethernet Technology Summit held in San Jose. The idea of supplying high-speed communications and power over one standard cable that works anywhere in the world is certainly compelling because there are many difficulties in developing a power-delivery scheme that works ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/03/01/power-over-ethernet-once-cable-defines-an-entire-product-envelope/ Literally within an hour of posting my last blog entry on designing low-power systems with FPGAs, Altera’s marketing engine issued a related email and dropped it into my inbox. Altera’s email pre-announces the company’s upcoming FPGAs based on 28nm lithography. The email included the following marketing graph (with no scale) ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/02/01/designing-low-power-systems-with-fpgas-part-2/ Actel has published a White Paper discussing low-power aspects of using FPGAs. It should not surprise you that the White Paper’s points and conclusions favor Actel’s Flash-based FPGAs over SRAM-based FPGAs from other vendors but that bias should not stop you from extracting some good meat from the document. The first ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/02/01/designing-low-power-systems-with-fpgas/ This TI video has been on YouTube for more than a year, but it’s new to me and pretty interesting. With all of the new low-power microcontroller announcements lately, this video is an excellent reminder that there are lots of good choices for low-power processors out there. If you don’t ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/01/04/ti-msp430-low-power-microcontroller-demo-runs-on-grapes/ Silicon Labs has a diverse set of chips on offer and I’m really taken by the video demo of its new Si1120 Touchless Slider evaluation kit. The QuickSense Si1120 is an active infrared proximity sensor that you can use to build a variety of products with innovative, ultra-low power, touchless ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/01/04/touchless-slider-is-one-cool-user-interface-driven-by-low-power-microcontroller/ Microchip is an incredibly successful microcontroller vendor with a massive array of chips to choose from. The company has a series of low-power microcontrollers and refers to them as NanoWatt XLP (extremely low power) devices. In support of those devices, Microchip published a chapter on “Tips ‘n Tricks” to wring ... http://low-powerdesign.com/sleibson/2010/01/03/7-tricks-from-microchip-to-drop-power-consumption-on-any-microcontroller/