44th Design Automation Conference — Register Today!

DAC — June 4-8 to San Diego, CA. The world’s largest electronic design event! 240+ exhibitors, 200+ papers, panels, tutorials and the special Automotive Design sessions. Plus, don’t miss the Management Seminar with Dr. Geoffrey Moore. Register by May 7th and save 25%!

How can your application exhibit better power management and/or motor control? Ultimately, only you can answer that question, but a few vendors have capitalized on the "green" trend to help you educate yourself. National Semiconductor, for example, has launched both a worldwide seminar series here, and a revamped online power design tool called WEBENCH®, here. On the news front, the company recently announced six high-frequency buck regulators to its popular SIMPLE SWITCHER® product family along with a "dial-in" performance enhancement to its WEBENCH® design environment, here. The goal is to allow non-power experts to easily adjust, and improve, the power efficiency of their designs.

In the networking space, Echelon Corporation has taken the lead on "going green" through energy savings, leveraged via their new product, the Pyxos FT Embedded Control Networking Platform. "The focus on alternative sources as the sole answer to our energy problems is unfortunate because conservation of existing energy sources provides immediate benefits today," said Bea Yormark, Echelon's president and COO. And, to put money behind its vision, Echelon has announced their "Control without Limits" design contest, with $10,000 in prizes to winners based on green potential and "coolness." By participating, you can simultaneously educate yourself on energy-efficient networking and enter to win lucrative prizes. Check it out, here.

National Semiconductor is again a leader here, straddling the FPGA fence with power design guides for both Xilinx (here) and Altera (here). In conjunction with the FPGA vendors, National provides analog signal conditioning, conversion, and serial data-transfer solutions to meet the needs of technically demanding applications in complex systems for data communications, industrial, automotive, electronics, medical, or consumer devices.

Among the FPGA vendors themselves, Quicklogic has been out in front early by emphasizing power as a defining product characteristic via their PolarPro™ product family followed recently by ArcticLink™ (Announcement here). Xilinx has followed with a helpful "Power Center" offering tools and tips to improve power consumption in Xilinx FPGAs. And Altera has launched their Cyclone III FPGAs, optimized for low power. Information here.