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System-level design

Tews expands VITA 93-QMC offering for mezzanine design

TEWS Technologies TQMC800 carrier

Eight single-width QMC modules and a CompactPCI Serial QMC carrier have been announced by Tews Technologies, designed to accelerate adoption of the mezzanine standard. The additions to its VITA 93 – QMC portfolio,  will accelerate adoption of the new mezzanine standard, said Tews Technologies. The VITA 93 – QMC form factor addresses the aerospace and defence sector’s need for compact, ...

Hotspot hot potato

Normally, silicon scaling is a good thing. Except when you are making power devices, as people working in the automotive semiconductor business explained at the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference this week in Dresden. Klaus Meder, president of the automotive electronics division at Robert Bosch, explained in his keynote speech that denser devices are causing headaches when ...

MSP430 clones explore limits of MCU power

The Texas Instruments MSP430 is practically synonymous with low-power processors and, although the company may not care much for the idea of clones of the architecture appearing, that is being helped by a crop of research processors that explore the limits of the threshold voltage of CMOS transistors. These designs are helping to push the MSP430 into lower-power territory than ...

Accellera puts next release of SystemC library up for review

Transaction-level modelling and system-level analysis are important tasks for any low-power design activity given the major savings that can be made at this level: simply stopping transactions from repeating needlessly pays big in terms of reducing circuit activity and, with it, energy usage. So, a new release in the SystemC world is something to watch and version 2.3 of the ...

Power predictions

It’s the season for predictions and Brian Bailey, writing at EDN points out some power-related issues among other predictions made by some of the people he asked.

Linux p-p-picks up power profiling for peripherals

Linus Torvalds has signed off on the latest release of the Linux kernel, version 3.2, and it contains several additions aimed at power-management. The new code modules have been submitted over the past year by engineers working at Samsung and Texas Instruments, among others. Linux 3.1, completed late last year, also included some tools for power monitoring: cpupowerutils. The latest ...

Is subthreshold all that?

When looking at new architectures for low-power operation, it is easy to get fixated on one part of the design and ignore the ramifications for the rest of the system. The consequences of that are demonstrated in a paper that was presented at last year’s International Symposium on Low-Power Electronic Design in Japan. Rami Abdallah, Pradeep Shenoy, Naresh Shanbhag and ...

Consumer electronics’ energy share

With its Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas looming, the Consumer Electronics Association has published figures claiming that electronic devices still account for a relatively small share of the electricity consumption in the average US home. Or at least they did in 2010. The figures were put together by the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems based on data collected ...