National Semiconductor Corp has launched an initiative to help customers create more energy-efficient systems that use less power, generate less heat, have a smaller form factor and/or longer battery life.
The trend towards energy conservation continues to grow worldwide. As market forces drive higher user experience expectations and the adoption of video streaming and sharing, mobile broadband, and unlimited storage capacity, the resources required to power this trend is finite.
Therefore, enabling electronic systems to be more energy efficient becomes imperative and is especially important as the cost of energy continues to rise.
At the system level, National helps customers solve energy efficiency problems with integrated circuits (ICs) from its PowerWise family of components as well as architecting unique system solutions which it embeds in silicon or licenses as intellectual property.
There are currently approximately 300 ICs in the PowerWise family including energy-efficient power management, operational amplifier, interface and data conversion products.
The company has established a set of PowerWise metrics to help system designers easily compare and select energy-efficient analogue components and subsystems. Depending on the type of IC, National used product-specific, practical formulas incorporating commonly used engineering measurements to determine each efficiency specification for 24 product families.