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Green Electronics Strategies – Reducing Power Consumption

Wednesday 18th November 2009

What is so good about Low Power Electronics?

 

If you read my last post, you would have noticed that this has the potential to reduce overall Power Requirements. Up until now, only Battery Operated Devices have really cared about Power Consumption. If you could plug it into a wall outlet then all was OK unless you were consuming more power than a standard circuit allowed.

 

Today, things are different. Climate Change is a global concern and reducing the Carbon Footprint for a product is important, regardless of what sort of power it consumes.

 

If we can reduce the Power Consumption of an appliance by 50%, then provided its Electronics Manufacture does not add that back again, we have a net Carbon Footprint gain. In fact, if we can do this across all products then we will meet our Global Carbon Reduction target of 50% by 2050 with this strategy alone.

 

 

How to reduce Electronics Power Consumption

This is not a new topic, and much of what I present here represents the combined experience of the Electronics and Embedded Software industry. Here is the short list:

  • reduce the Supply Voltage for Microcontrollers, Microprocessors and CMOS Circuits in general
  • use Sleep Modes and keep the Wake Periods as short as possible
  • replace High Power Consumption Devices with Low Power Consumption Devices
  • replace high utilisation Digital Filters with Analogue Electronics equivalents
  • replace Polled Operating Modes with Event Driven Operating Modes
  • use Low Power Smart Peripherals that Wake the rest of the System only when required
  • reduce the Time To Wake and the Time To Sleep
  • optimise the Software Execution Flow
  • use Energy Harvesting
  • Remove power from sections of Electronics Circuitry when not in use

There is overlap and interdependency between these but that is a good starting point.

 

Next I will start look at specific examples.

 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

 

 

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